The Wharton MBA Curriculum Committee proposed that a course entitled Business Responsibility and Regulation be developed for possible inclusion in the core. A three-person committee of John Lubin, Ollie Williamson and Thomas Dunfee developed a proposal. The course was taught over several semesters, often on a team-teaching basis with faculty from Management, Public Policy, Legal Studies and Marketing participating. The ultimate decision was to approve the course as an elective (LGST 810), which was offered continuously until the early 1990s. The course was one of the capstone requirement options for many headlines. Five to eight sections were offered per year during its peak.

In 1977-78, the Wharton School was one of three business schools (along with Northwestern) that participated in the Committee for Education in Business Ethics, a project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Association. The committee was comprised of three philosophers, three business school faculty members (one from Wharton) and three businesspeople. The Committee designed a prototype for a course in business ethics.

In the late 1970s, a group of undergraduate students approached faculty members indicating that they wanted to develop an undergraduate equivalent of our graduate level course, LGST 810 Business Responsibility and Regulation. Eight students worked on the project and presented a course to the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee that was approved and has been offered continuously since then as LGST 210. Initially an elective, the course became an option in the Social Environment Bracket requirement in 1991. Seven hundred Wharton students took the course during the past two academic years (2000-2002) along with many non-Wharton students.

In 1982, the Joseph Kolodny Chair in Social Responsibility in Business was established with Thomas Dunfee becoming the first chair holder.

Wharton received a grant from the Exxon Education Foundation in 1985.  This grant enabled Wharton professors to conduct a study of the integration of ethics into the MBA curriculum. Seven Wharton faculty participated in the project including Erin Anderson, Bala Chravarthy, Thomas Dunfee, Bulent Gultekin, Diana Robertson, Paul Tiffany and Eric Van Merkenstein. The report of the project was published in 1986, and copies were distributed to business schools throughout the world. An article describing the project was published in the Journal of Business Ethics and subsequently translated and published in Japan in the Review of Administrative Behavior.

See, Dunfee, Thomas W., and D. Robertson. "Integrating Ethics Into the Business School Curriculum." Journal of Business Ethics 7(11) (1988): 847-59.

In the Fall of 1986, an experimental course in values and ethics was attempted with the Lauder program. The course was co-taught by Joanne Ciulla, Lawrence Klein and Thomas Dunfee. The course was followed by a non-credit required module in ethics that was taught by Dunfee/Klein on two occasions, and then subsequently by Ciulla through 1990. The Lauder module was part of the general MBA modules/banner course coverage.

Several attempts to market a program specially designed in the ethics area were unsuccessful. Four forums on ethics were attempted in the initial AMP Program; a smaller component was tried in the second program and the ethics coverage was dropped thereafter. Ethics segments were successful in several of the one week programs including the Pension Fund Managers, the National Commercial Finance Association, Strategic Management Program, Investment Management Consultant Association and the International Brotherhood of Pension Funds. A major constraint was the thinly stretched faculty in ethics at the time. With the arrival of Thomas Donaldson in 1996, ethics coverage was successfully implemented into a number of executive education programs.

Norm Bowie (Minnesota), Jules Coleman (Yale), Tom Donaldson (then Georgetown), Georges Enderle (then St. Gallen, Switzerland), Ed Freeman (Darden), Lynn Paine (Harvard), Prakash Sethi (Baruch), Patricia Werhane (Darden), and others.

In Fall 1990, a brown bag series in business ethics was developed and brought in guest speakers from University of Leeds-England, IESE-Barcelona, University of Georgia, Harvard, Darden, and those from departments at Wharton.

During the Fall of 1990, as a result of a faculty vote, an experimental ethics module was introduced into the MBA program. The module was a four session, required, non-credit component of the curriculum. The faculty approved the new experimental curriculum in which ethics was integrated into Management 652, the so-called "banner course." The ten traditional cohorts took the ethics module in the Fall 1991. The banner coverage and the WEMBA coverage was held in Spring 1992.

As a result of the revision of the undergraduate curriculum, LGST 210 became part of the environmental bracket requirement. Students are required to take two courses from the bracket. LGST 210 is one of three courses in the bracket.

Thomas Dunfee named as Director and Lauretta Tomasco named as Coordinator.
The program was established with the following objectives:

* To enable students to develop the critical skills and analytical frameworks essential to identify, characterize, and resolve ethical problems likely to arise in their business careers.
* To acquaint students and faculty with literature on professional ethics and corporate responsibility.
* To encourage the moral and intellectual development of students.
* To support and encourage empirical and theoretical research in business ethics.

The Joel and Lois Coleman Essay Contest in Business Ethics program was established in 1995.  The program ran for several years through the Wharton Ethics Program.  In 2001 Vice Dean Thomas Dunfee and Mr. Coleman moved the essay contest forward by turning the event into a lecture series, thus the birth of The Joel and Lois Coleman Social Impact Lecture Series.

The Wharton Ethics Program launched its first newsletter entitled "Business Ethics at Wharton: Report on significant research, teaching and outreach undertaken at the Wharton School."

Thomas Donaldson was appointed as new Director of Wharton Ethics Program to replace Thomas Dunfee.

The Carol and Lawrence Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research was established in 1997. Thomas Dunfee named as Director and Lauretta Tomasco named as Associate Director. The mission of the Center is to sponsor and disseminate leading edge research on critical topics in business ethics. It provides students, educators, business leaders, and policy makers with research to meet the ethical, governance, and compliance challenges that arise in complex business transactions. The Zicklin Center supports research that examines those organizational incentives and disincentives that promote ethical business practices, along with the firm-level features, processes, and decision making associated with failures of governance, compliance, and integrity.

Thomas W. Dunfee steps down as Director of the Zicklin Center to become the Vice Dean of the Wharton Undergraduate Division. Bill Laufer is named new Director.

David Messick, Center for the Study of Ethical Issues in Business, Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University - "Some Psychological Constraints on Ethical Decision Making"

Faculty from Wharton met with Harvard peers to discuss leadership, ethics and law, emerging issues, and possible future collaboration.

The Working Group on Crime as Business (WGCB) is a joint effort by the Carol and Lawrence Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to address crime in the context of a host of different legitimate and illegitimate markets. The WGCB is designed as a strategic partnership between academics and government with a simple and modest objective: to meet once every academic semester to engage in a conceptual discussion about crime as business and crime in the context of business. To leverage some of the path breaking scholarship in this area, a group of leading researchers in the following areas: (1) corporate crime, (2) white collar crime, (3) drug offenses, (4) human smuggling and slavery, (5) domestic and international organized crime, (6) terrorism, and (7) international banking and money.

The doctoral program in Ethics & Legal Studies was approved by the Wharton faculty in 2003 and the program officially began in Fall of 2004. It focuses on the study of ethical and legal norms of conduct in management. It strives to produce exceptional scholars capable of undertaking the best of research and teaching in the field. The program embodies a “core-plus” design in which students take a core set of courses in the area of ethics and law in business plus courses in one additional disciplinary concentration, such as management, finance, marketing, or accounting. Hence the program combines intensive graduate level training in business ethics and law with advanced training in one other business discipline offered at Wharton.

The name change better reflects the department's curricular offerings and faculty research. The department is the Wharton School’s base for scholarship and teaching at the intersection of law, ethics and business.

The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank) and the Zicklin Center agreed to collaborate on learning and knowledge sharing programs.

The Levy Social Impact Fund at Wharton began in July 2006 with the generosity of Robert M. Levy and Diane v.S. Levy through a gift to support social impact initiatives. These initiatives include student, faculty and institutional initiatives in such areas as social impact management and business ethics, including summer internships for students who want to work in either the public or nonprofit sectors.

On August 23, 2007 in Washington, D.C., the Center for Political Accountability (CPA) and the Wharton School’s Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research announced a new collaborative effort on corporate governance and corporate political accountability.

Diana C. Robertson joined the Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department.

Alan Strudler appointed as Faculty Coordinator of the Ethics and Legal Studies Doctoral Program.

Nien-he Hsieh appointed as Director of the Wharton Ethics Program.

Diana C. Robertson named Joseph Kolodny Professor of Social Responsibility in Business.

Diana C. Robertson and Nien-hê Hsieh appointed as Co-Directors of the Wharton Ethics Program.

Amy Sepinwall joined the Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department.

Thomas Donaldson named as Director of the Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research.

He is also the Mark O. Winkelman Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, having written broadly in the area of business ethics, values, and leadership.

The Wharton faculty has approved, by an overwhelming majority, a new vision for MBA education, grounded in flexibility for our diverse student body, academic rigor, continuous innovation of course content and a commitment to lifelong learning, with an integrated focus on ethical and legal responsibility in business.

A restructuring of the required curriculum, set to take effect for the class of 2014, enhancements of the MBA program include:

• new lifelong learning commitment
• greater emphasis on analytics to understand the markets and associated risks
• added emphasis on teamwork, communications and self-awareness
• an integrated focus on ethical and legal responsibility in business
• increased flexibility for individualized learning