The Sauder School of Business announced yesterday that it will be establishing the Peter Dhillon Centre of Business Ethics.
“I would say that this is a really important initiative for the school and for the university. My view is that values need to be an important part of business education,” said Robert Helsley, Dean of Sauder.
The Centre is a $7.5 million initiative. The funding for the project came from a partnership between UBC alumnus and Ocean Spray's chair, Peter Dhillon, and the Sauder school. According to Helsley, this initiative aims to expand and invigorate business ethics education at the university.
Thursday’s ceremony took place at Hotel Georgia in Downtown Vancouver. Speakers at the ceremony included Dhillon, Helsley and UBC President Arvind Gupta, former British Columbia Attorney General Wally Oppal, Lieutenant Governor of B.C. Judith Guichon and Richmond City Councillor Alexa Loo.
According to Helsley, the $7.5 million will go towards hiring new faculty and staff to instruct on business ethics, as well as the creation of new academic courses and incorporating ethics into existing business courses, as well as an increasing amount of academic research on this subject.
"As an educational institution, I think we all see that there is a particular responsibility to address ethics as part of business education," said Helsley. "My sense is that the students are sort of increasingly interested in ethical issues and in the ability of, or perhaps, the responsibility of government and business to work together to solve problems."
According to Helsley, ethics is an essential component of business studies because it helps to maintain a thriving and functional global economy.
Dhillon said that his motivation to help fund the Centre of Business Ethics emerged as a result of the 2008 financial crisis, which he claims could have put numerous businesses worldwide in peril, including his own. He also hopes that improving business ethics education at the university would in the long term set a positive precedent for other academic institutions to emulate.
"You can look to a lot of problems like [the 2008 financial crisis] and see that there are ethics at least in part at the root of the problem. So I don’t think it’s that ethics are in decline, it’s that ethics are increasingly important," said Helsley.
During the ceremony, Oppal offered praising remarks to Dhillon and the university for carrying out this initiative. Oppal said that from a legal perspective, a better recognition and understanding of business ethics could help prevent and minimize white-collar crimes and their detrimental effects.
“I can tell you that this is needed … the impact of commercial white-collar crime is every bit devastating,” said Oppal, during the presentation.