This time it is Marylhurst University launching a "sustainability MBA" online.

Anaheim University in California already has one and has taken this moment to announce that enrollments are doing very nicely thank you: nearly doubled over the last 3 months.

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Ronald J. Colombo, corporate and securities law professor at Hofstra University School of Law, argues that the route out of this crisis is character.

In a well written piece in the HuffPo, Mr Colombo sets out the limits of law in providing a real solution to current problems, the need instead for the cultivation of virtue - a renewed emphasis on character development in business education.

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Communications professionals in Ghana have called on the government to implement a National Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Framework.

The call was made at a trade fair organized by the Junior Chamber International (JCI) Ghana and supported by other local business groups.

According to the report in the Ghanaian Chronicle, the group called "for a regulatory body to be set up to regulate corporate social responsibility to meet international standards, adding Listed Companies on the Ghana Stock Exchange should be required to report on their CSR."

Mr. Kweku Rockson, a senior lecturer at the Ghana Institute of Journalism, "urged the government to create a public policy framework, including legislation for the corporate social responsibility to check the operations of companies in the country."

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In one of the latest contributions to the HBR debate on business education, the Rotman School's Roger Martin calls for a deep, broad and dynamic MBA.

In some respects he appears to be advocating a more philosophical approach to management education that encourages the questioning of standard assumptions, models and frameworks. Good to see from a business school dean.

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The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is consulting on whether to tighten rules relating to conflicts of interest in medical research it finances.

The move comes following growing concern about the objectivity of research that has been financed or materially supported by drug companies or medical device manuafacturers.

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Dear old Citigroup.  The latest way they're spending their $45 billion bailout?  An email campaign to their student borrowers, trying to incite them to lobby Congress on Citigroup's behalf in opposition to President Obama's proposed student loan overhaul. 

The overhaul, which would eliminate the $15 million a day the banker-middlmen have been raking in on student loans by allowing students to borrow directly from the Federal govenrnment, is obviously bad news for Citibank.  But is it bad news for students? 

TPM has a full copy of the email sent to student borrowers here.  Here's my favorite part:

"Why Get Involved?
The government budget outline proposes offering federal student loans solely through the federal government's Direct Lending Program starting July of next year. While this proposal will not impact a borrower's ability to obtain a federal student loan, it will eliminate your ability to choose a student loan provider. It will also substantially increase the national debt since each and every federally-insured student loan will be funded by the Federal Treasury through the issuance of treasury securities. This proposal impacts you as a citizen - both as a taxpayer and as a borrower."

I will leave the argument about "choice" for another day; suffice to say it's the same tired old argument that private companies always make whenever the public sector threatens a favorite cash cow.  "Choice," in this case, is a complete fallacy: because the government already sets the terms for Federally-guaranteed Stafford loans, it doesn't matter to students who loans them the money.

No, the part I LOVE is the bit about how borrowing from the government will "increase the national debt," something that Citibank knows young people are (rightly) concerned about.  This is where it looks like Citigroup is hoping that America's students are a big bunch of dummies who apparently don't know the difference between a loan, which is repaid with interest, thus adding to the national coffers, and a gift.  A gift, like the $45 billion the Federal treasury, no, the American taxpayers, have given to Citibank, no strings attached.

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New leadership will be collaborative, leading from the ground, interpersonally sensitive, and maximizing created good rather than personal wealth.

So argue educators and CEOs in this piece from the Financial Post in Canada.

They intereview Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto:

"“The crisis is [partly] a product of managerial theory and needs to be revisited in a serious way,” Mr. Martin says. The notion that companies need to align managers with shareholders by giving them stock-based compensation is flawed, he says. Mr. Martin refers to the widely influential Jensen and Meckling academic paper, published in the Journal of Financial Economics in 1976, which argued that equity ownership by managers would reduce misalignment between them and shareholders. That theory created a generation of executives more interested in boosting stock prices than creating a real market, he adds."

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A new report by EIRIS finds that the financial sector performed worst at managing environmental, social and governance risks.

This major survey by the ethical investment research service compared 2,200 companies listed
on the FTSE All-Word Developed Index. The research tracked the companies' progress on managing non-financial ESG risk issues over a three year period (2005-2008).

More broadly across all sectors, EIRIS finds that there has been some but nevertheless limited progress on management of ESG risks over the period studied.

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A business school professor argues in BusinessWeek for the inclusion of a course on combatting climate change within the business school curriculum.

London School of Economics, Stanford, Rotterdam and the Said Business School at Oxford all stand out as leaders on this, contrasted with the fact that 1.3% of articles in the main academic business journals address environmental issues.

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Former Harvard Business School faculty member and author of "When Corporations Rule the World" has entered the HBR debate on business education.

He argues that the most important lesson he learned at business school was the need to fix a system rather than the symptoms of a problem. Never was that lesson more important than in the current economic crisis. Yet, to his knowledge, Harvard Business School simply does not encourage its students to think outside the paradigm of the current system.

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