Haas’ program, which one advocate describes as “Scared Straight for Business Students” — a reference to a program where youthful offenders are read the riot act by prison lifers — isn’t unique. There are already similar programs at the University of Maryland and at Pepperdine, among others. And, in light in the recent spate of corporate scandals, the number is sure to grow. All across the country, schools are responding, not only to the scandals themselves, but the criticism they received. As Campbell puts it, programs like his answer the question “is there nothing that business schools can teach that would have prevented the recent scandals?”

The answer to that question is “Yes, but it involves a lot more than setting up a play date with a guy in an orange jumpsuit.”

The response to Enron and similar scandals goes beyond field trips. Across the country, both undergraduate and graduate business departments are offering courses that seek to explain and analyze what went wrong in cases like Enron, Global Crossing and others. The goal, both stated and unstated, to avoid a repetition of the scandals.

Arguably the most comprehensive such course is one offered at the University of California at Irvine. There, a course completely devoted to the Enron affair drew more than 250 applicants for the 55 places in Professor Richard McKenzie’s class. Students will examine the ethical, financial and legal aspects of the company’s activities assisted by guest presenters such as Sherron Watkins, the Enron whistle-blower.

Elsewhere, the most common response is a renewed emphasis on teaching business ethics. Kim Clark, the dean of the Harvard Business School, which was embarrassed by the role played by some of the school’s alumni in the scandals, has ordered a review of the school’s ethics curriculum. The mandatory ethics class, entitled “Leadership, Values and Decision Making,” has been extended from three weeks to the entire semester and has been updated to include examples from the past year’s scandals. The goal is to help future managers and executives understand their “obligations under the law.”

Similar efforts are underway at other schools. According to the Washington Times, schools across the country are looking for the best way to “impart ethics to developing minds.” Some are employing ethics courses tied to specific disciplines such as business or law. Others are requiring generic ethics courses. Some are teaching basic ethical principles. Others prefer case studies.

This all sounds pretty good until you realize that very little, if any, of this has anything to do with right or wrong. To understand why this is the case, we first need to be clear about what is meant by “ethics,” especially in a professional context. Ethics is a code of conduct for a particular discipline or profession. Physicians, accountants and lawyers, among others, all have ethics and codes of conduct that define their obligations to their patients and clients and seek to safeguard the reputation of the particular profession or discipline.

The problem is that even meticulous adherence to these ethics and codes doesn’t guarantee that people will do what most of us would consider the right thing. For instance, while medical ethics requires consent before performing an abortion, it permits the abortion itself. Similarly, as Michelle Cottle wrote in a recent New Republic article about the role lawyers played in the Global Crossing debacle, lawyers are expected to “gauge how close to the legal edge a client can walk without falling off.” Their ethical obligation is to their client and that obligation is only superseded when “failure to do so is likely to result in imminent death or substantial bodily harm.” Stated differently, a lot of harm can be done by people whose conduct meets ethical requirements.

Then there’s the matter of what is being taught in these ethics courses. As Amitai Etzioni of George Washington University recently wrote, “many business school professors choose to steer clear of teaching morality, pointing out, with some justification, that . . . what is ‘ethical’ is far from obvious. What appears ethical to one person is not to another, they say, and what is ethical under some conditions is not under others.”

If teaching morality — as in “it’s wrong to lie” — is out, what do you teach in an ethics class? How do schools prepare students to confront the “morally and legally thorny issues” that arise in the business world and “[consider] the challenges to the morality of business raised by contemporary critics?” The syllabus for a course entitled “Business Ethics” at Auburn University provides a pretty typical answer. Among the ethical priorities for future masters of the universe are privacy, affirmative action, sexual harassment, comparable worth, “reproductive hazards in the workplace,” pollution and corporate social responsibility. The list was similar at places such as Ole Miss, Jacksonville University and Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business.

It should come as no surprise, then, that a National Association of Scholars (NAS) study found that “recruiting a diverse workforce in which women and minorities are advanced and promoted” was ranked as business’ top ethical priority by the college class of 2002. Among business majors, nearly six in 10 named something besides “providing clear and accurate business statements to stockholders and creditor,” such as “minimizing environmental pollution by adopting the latest anti-pollution technology and complying with government regulations,” as the top ethical priority.

All of which is to say that the problem isn’t that students aren’t learning the lessons taught in ethics courses; it’s that the lessons being taught are usually the wrong ones. I’m not saying that a diverse workplace isn’t a laudable goal nor am I saying that protecting the environment isn’t important. The problem is that if right and wrong in the business world is reduced to politically-palatable policy proposals (say that three times fast), then we haven’t learned anything from the most recent spate of corporate scandals.

Global Crossing, WorldCom and other cases weren’t primarily legal, policy or even ethical failures. They were first and foremost, moral failures. In each case, someone either ignored or had turned off the interior alarm that goes off when we’re about to do something or cross a line that we shouldn’t. This alarm, which goes by the name of conscience, doesn’t need the advice of counsel or ethics’ boards to know that accounting procedures designed to mislead investors and regulators by overstating profits and hiding losses are wrong.

This assumes that we haven’t been working overtime to subvert the function of conscience. And that’s what has happened, starting with repeatedly telling ourselves things such as “what is right and wrong depends on differences in individual values and cultural diversity.” This is what three-quarters of the NAS survey respondents said they believed. It would be hard to imagine a better way to disable our internal alarm than insisting that right and wrong is relative and learning ethics in an environment that that intentionally “steer[s] clear of teaching morality.”

But morality is exactly what’s needed to prevent a repeat of Tyco et al. Many ethics classes bear a depressing resemblance to ancient Israel as described in the book of Judges where “every man did what was right in his own eyes.” But whereas the author of Judges clearly thought that this state of affairs was a bad thing, contemporary ethics curriculum, such as Dartmouth’s, just expect you to engage “the issue[s] and form your own opinions.”

In contrast, morality, in particular the Judeo-Christian tradition, proceeds from the assumption that something other than the autonomous individual is the final arbiter of right and wrong. It expects people to conform their actions to something that transcends their narrow self-interest. It understands that inviting people to form their own opinions without regard to anything other than themselves is an invitation to the kind of rationalization and moral blindness that made the scandals possible. It understands that a conscience, shaped by firm standards of right and wrong, is sometimes all that stands between a Harvard MBA and being fitted for an orange jumpsuit.