This fall, for the first time, incoming Business School students will spend their first day discussing ethics. The scheduling of this day-long ethics orientation follows two years of B-School indecision about the role ethics should play in its curriculum.

This past year the study of ethics was given a tentative place in the first-year courseload, incorporated as a seven-session, ungraded module which lasted three weeks and was required of all entering students.

The class, approved last winter by the school's faculty, represents a departure from the administration's previous efforts to integrate ethics throughout the first-year curriculum. In fact, following the school's receipt of a $30 million grant for the teaching of ethics in 1987, B-School officials said repeatedly that there would be no required course.

The module has been lauded by students and faculty as a valuable first step in both addressing the study of ethics and providing a foundation for further discussion of ethical issues in other courses.

"The Business School has come through after a lot of talk and question marks to show it's in it for the long haul, after years of people saying it should do something and [President Derek C.] Bok saying it should do something," says the Rev. Robert K. Massie, a doctoral student at the B-School and a former fellow in the University's Ethics and the Professions program. "Ethics is something that could have been blown off, [but B-School officials] have shown they're not kidding about it."

The B-School's efforts to improve ethics instruction were facilitated two years ago by the well-publicized $30 million grant to the school, announced shortly after Wall Street's unprecedented insider trading scandal. Two-thirds of the funds were given by 1949 Harvard MBA John S.R. Shad, now Chair of the Board of Drexel, Burnham, Lambert, Inc., who chaired the Securities and Exchange Commission at the time of his gift.

Next year, according to Senior Associate Dean for Educational Programs Thomas R. Piper, the module will be expanded to include 10 sessions, in addition to the first day of classes.

Those professors who now teach the module will continue to do so next year, says Piper. Afterwards, though, the school will implement a rotation system: in any given year, half of the module's professors will have taught the classes in the previous year, and half will be new to the program, to remain within the module for one or two years before returning to their normal areas of expertise.

Piper says he thinks such a structure should bolster not only the ethics background of the students, but also that of the faculty, few of whom have focused on ethics in their research.

However, some observers say a long road lies ahead before a broad and genuine interest in ethics comes to permeate all aspects of the school's curriculum.

Besides using cases in its own courses, Harvard is the main supplier of case studies to business schools throughout the country; and some outside scholars have noted that the B-School has published few cases dealing with ethical issues.

Joanne B. Ciulla, a visiting scholar at Oxford University specializing in ethics and a former post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, says she often writes her own studies in order to compensate for the short supply of Harvard ethics cases.

In addition, says management professor James W. Kuhn '50 of the Columbia Graduate School of Business, Harvard cases concentrate inordinately on the ethical failings of individual business executives rather than problems inherent in the business world itself.

Part of the reason there is a dearth of ethics case studies may be that the school has only recently taken to emphasizing the field.

In fact, it appears that only after the announcement of the Shad grant did the B-School begin to display concern about retaining its ethics specialists. Shortly before announcement of the gift, the school advised its only junior ethicist, Associate Professor of Business Administration Kenneth E. Goodpaster, not to pursue tenure. B-School sources then said Goodpaster was told that if he sought tenure, he would be denied it.