Business ethics gets boost from a $600,000 Prudential grant
Archived article from Mar 1, 2002
By Dave Muha
When Arthur F. Ryan, Prudential financial chair and chief executive officer, and President Francis L. Lawrence announced the establishment of the Prudential Business Ethics Center at Rutgers- Newark last month, the one question that no one had to ask was "Why?" The string of national headlines in recent years -- ranging from Kathie Lee Gifford sweatshops in Costa Rica and World Trade Organization riots in Seattle to the current congressional inquiry into the fall of Enron -- has clearly framed the issue in the public's mind.
Only in recent years has business ethics been taken seriously at the best business schools and developed into a rigorous discipline. In establishing the Prudential Business Ethics Center, the university joins Wharton, Harvard and the University of Virginia as one of only a small number of national universities that have significant resources devoted to the subject. The Prudential center is the only academic unit of its kind in the New York metropolitan region.
"The university is honored that Prudential has stepped forward to support a new center dedicated to the study of business ethics," said Lawrence. "For generations, Rutgers has had a steadfast commitment to the highest ethical standards, and the Prudential Business Ethics Center at Rutgers will help us raise issues and ideas to a broader community."
"Our center is meant to support the teaching of business ethics to our students, and to corporate audiences as well," added Professor Edwin M. Hartman, who will direct the new center. Hartman is a member of the international business/business environment and philosophy departments.
According to Hartman, the center will host new courses, guest speakers, ethics case competitions, conferences for student and corporate audiences, and other forms of outreach. It will also support faculty research by funding graduate research assistants and travel to business ethics conferences.
"The names of Prudential and Rutgers will be turning up in all the best journals and all the best popular media," he predicted.
The establishment of the Prudential Business Ethics Center at Rutgers is the extension of a collaboration that began in March 1999 when the financial services company co-sponsored a conference at the Rutgers Business School in Newark on corruption and human rights. The relationship continued the following spring when Prudential helped inaugurate an ongoing lecture series at the school. That series identifies and gives a forum to the leading young scholars in the field of business ethics and engages them in conversations on current topics with students, faculty and others in the business community.
The center will start with a core faculty of five from Rutgers Business School's international business/business environment department. These faculty members all have significant theoretical and practical experience in law, ethics and business. In addition, the center will involve other faculty from the business school and from Rutgers' nationally ranked philosophy department.
The $600,000 grant to start the new business ethics center is part of a larger $1 million gift from the Prudential Foundation. The gift includes $100,000 to equip a reading room at the Margery Somers Foster Center. A collaboration between Douglass College and the Rutgers University Libraries, the Margery Somers Foster Center provides those working in the fields of women's and gender studies with a scholarly resource dedicated to acquiring, creating, preserving and promoting world-class research and scholarship. The center is named in honor of a former dean of Douglass College and the first female member of Prudential's corporate board of directors.
The Prudential gift also includes a $300,000 unrestricted gift to The Rutgers Campaign: Creating the Future Today.
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