Economy & Policy

Catching up on the business-school oath story

By Justin Fox | June 22, 2009 | +

As part of what will be a continuing series of posts on things I should have written about weeks ago, but was too busy checking my book’s Amazon ranking to get to (it’s now bouncing around the mid 100s, which makes checking less fun, although it did debut on  the WSJ business best-seller list Friday, at #12), here’s what’s up with business schoolers and their oaths.

Clearly I was onto something with the piece I wrote in May about the Thunderbird Oath of Honor, a pledge-not-to-be-naughty recited at graduation by the MBAs at the Thunderbird School of International Management in Arizona. Soon afterward, a group of Harvard Business School students decided to get into the act with their own oath—which was, unlike Thunderbird’s, not endorsed by the school’s administration. Matthew Bishop did a nice job of summing things up in the Economist, and at BusinessWeek Anne VanderMey told of how the idea is now spreading—to Northwestern’s Kellogg’s School, NYU’s Stern School, Oxford’s Saïd School and elsewhere. Pledging to behave honorably appears to have become downright fashionable among MBAs. I’m a little unclear on the broader meanings of this: It could be a sea change, it could be a fad. But in any case, you read about it here first.

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  • sonofahistoryprof

    The fact that momentum is building for Oaths to be pledged at graduation from business schools is welcome and needed. Thank you for covering the story and kicking off a movement! If anyone is unsure about the impact of “reciting an oath at the transition from education to application”, please note that the oath ought to come from the students, but then become a part of the very fabric of the education that the institution provides, the way it has at my business school, the Thunderbird School of Global Management.

    When classes first started, President Cabrera moderated a discussion involving every incoming student in my cohort about the oath and we discussed its pros, cons, implications, and consequences. It has been a part of the daily education from the beginning and throughout whole experience, not just appended to the end to differentiate our school and help improve our reputation.

    One day, a Thunderbird may willingly or ignorantly contravene the oath and let us down. But rest assured that the disappointment will come from the high standards that we students hold one another accountable to live up to.

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