When Dean Kim B. Clark reiterated the School's commitment to a values-based curriculum in the October 1999 Bulletin, he was carrying on a deep-rooted HBS tradition.

Wallace B. Donham, the School's Dean from 1919 to 1942, often championed this topic in early Bulletins, including in this excerpt from his 1927 campus dedication speech: "Especially it is necessary," Donham stated, "that we fix for business the foundation stones of the specialized ethics which are characteristic of all professions." A few years later, in 1929, General Electric chairman Owen D. Young ad-dressed the complexities of achieving that goal: "[I]f you ask me to apply the golden rule to a bank rate, I find it amazingly difficult to do."

In 1935, a special edition of the magazine carried the text of a major HBS report to Harvard's Board of Overseers outlining the School's plan to "enlarge its activities so as to be of still more service to the country" by expanding instruction in public aspects of business. Articles during World War II and beyond appealed to reader interest in the interplay of business and government in a rapidly changing world. Over six hundred graduates and guests came to campus for a 1948 alumni conference on "Responsibility for Business Leadership," which was covered extensively in the magazine.

In the early 1950s, Stanley F. Teele, who would serve as Dean from 1955 to 1962, described changes in the first-year curriculum aimed at instilling in students "the instinctive acceptance of responsi-bility . . . for the problems of the community in which the student operates." He asserted, "We must help make men develop open-mindedness plus the capacity to make value judgments."

Several Bulletin authors considered the sometimes contentious relationship between profit motive and business responsibility in the politically tumultuous 1960s. "Is profit really our goal?" asked Harry L. Smith (36th AMP) in a 1960 article. "I, for one, don't think so. . . . Our stubborn insistence on this point . . . accounts for much of our trouble with American society today." Articles on the social and ethical aspects of cases in the marketing curriculum and the results of a poll of business leaders' views on President Lyndon Johnson's antipoverty programs also appeared in this decade.

Coverage of School- and alumni-sponsored community outreach programs were featured in the early 1970s, including several pieces on volunteer consulting projects. In addition, in a special 1979 Bulletin essay on "Ethics in Business Education," Dean Lawrence E. Fouraker stated, "Personal integrity and social sensitivity are implicit in the idea of professionalism. . . . Nor has the School ever doubted that the concept of professionalism includes the components of social responsibility and accountability."

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Bulletin detailed a broad initiative launched under Dean John H. McArthur to incorporate ethical considerations into all areas of the curriculum. In the early 1990s, the magazine ran a two-part series that summarized the work of numerous faculty in making social responsibility and ethics an integral part of every HBS course. "Ethical issues arise in almost every facet of business," stated HBS professor Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr., in a 1991 article. "You can't really understand some of them unless you understand the marketing issues, financial issues, and production issues in the context of which these problems arise. Therefore, the material must be integrated throughout the required and elective curriculum and beyond the classroom as well." It is a vibrant initiative that will no doubt continue well into the next century.

- Deborah Blagg