After the gift became highly publicized, however, the school reversed its stance. B-School officials offered Goodpaster two additional years on the faculty, after which he will again be eligible for tenure review. Goodpaster and school officials have since declined to discuss his extension, which is an unusual arrangement in academia.

After some recruiting during the past two years, Harvard now has a core of about half a dozen ethicists among its 108-member faculty. Only a few of the nine professors who teach the first-year module can be considered ethics scholars, having devoted significant research to issues in the field.

But the B-School is not alone in having few ethics specialists among its faculty. Accomplished ethics professors are a select group, say scholars in the field, and even the B-School's greatest efforts would fail to secure as many professors as teach in programs such as finance or marketing.

"If Harvard went out tomorrow to recruit all the well-respected people in the field and had enough money to do it, there still wouldn't be enough" to amass a respectably sized faculty, says James A. Robins, assistant professor of strategic management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Though the inclusion of more ethics specialists may prove a slow process, the development of a required first-year module has been a highly visible commitment to the subject--a commitment that can only help to attract scholars.

A former Yale School of Management professor who will teach ethics at Harvard next year cites this enthusiastic environment as a primary reason behind his joining the B-School faculty. J. Gregory Dees, a fellow in the Ethics and the Professions program, says that although he favors expanding the required module to a full semester course, the school's new focus has impressed him as a "modest first step."

"I'm encouraged," says Dees. "That's why I'm leaving Yale to come to Harvard."

But despite these efforts, students say discussion of ethics outside the module often fails to transcend token references.

The B-School's grading system gives as much weight to class participation as to exams, discouraging reticence while rewarding those who contribute to class discussions. As a result, students say they often address the ethical elements of a case study only in last-ditch attempts--called "chip shots" in B-School parlance--to offer a relevant comment before class time elapses.

"It's hard to gauge how seriously people took the module," says first-year student Jillian K. Cowan. "I think it has become, sadly, a little bit of a joke. These things have to be taken seriously; but there are a lot of chip shots, and I don't know how to prevent that from happening."

And there remain some B-School students who have yet to be convinced that the study of ethics, either in its own right or in the context of other cases, is a necessary element of business education.

"Ethics is a nice kind of theoretical thing to talk about, but you can't teach ethics," says Heather Simmons, a first-year student. "If you can gain any kind of advantage for yourself that's legal, then do it."