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Thursday, August 8, 2002
Contact: Peter Bailley
news@knox.edu
309-341-7715
GALESBURG -- A commitment to the study of business ethics — a central component in Knox College's newly-created Program in Business and Management — was put in place long before this year's business-related scandals and the melt-down on Wall Street.
The program, which will enroll its first students this fall, features two courses on business ethics — nearly one-third of the seven-course requirement for a minor in business.
"The focus on business ethics, which you don't find in a lot of other programs, is one of the reasons I'm excited about this new program, and one of the reasons that it received a major start-up grant from the Kemper Foundation," said David Gourd, assistant professor of economics and the program's advisor.
Knox's program in business and management was developed by a faculty committee that began working in 2001. Earlier this year, the Kemper Foundation awarded Knox a grant of $31,000 to support the new program. The business ethics component was extensively debated by the faculty, Gourd said.
"We want students to think about the ramifications and implications of business decisions," said Gourd, who joined the Knox faculty in 2000. "For example, over the past two decades, a number of companies stopped focusing on real wealth and began focusing on stock prices. They developed techniques to manipulate their financial statements and boost their stock prices."
In addition to teaching courses in accounting, Gourd will teach a new course "Business and Society," which analyzes the relationships among business, government, people and the environment.
The "Ethics and Business" course examines "the nature of business and its relation to a good human life," according to the instructor, Lauren Tillinghast, assistant professor of philosophy. "We'll consider such questions as 'Do businesses owe anything to those who create the conditions in which they flourish?' " Tillinghast said.
Founded in 1837, Knox is a national liberal arts college in Galesburg, Illinois, with students from 48 states and 40 nations. Knox's "Old Main" is a National Historic Landmark and the only building remaining from the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.
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