Vulnerable, Not Fragile: The PCB Business Ethics Class Motto

In my business ethics course, this is our class motto. It makes an enormous difference for the quality of our discussions.

[ChatGPT initially tried but failed to spell Vulnerable, Not Fragile over and over again; here is its version of my class motto with an abstract painting.]

The Socratic dance

As discussed in previous posts, I practice a fierce form of the Socratic method in my business ethics course. I do this not because I find it entertaining to harass students and seek to destabilize their confidence in their conclusions. Well, okay, let me rephrase. I do this not exclusively because I find it entertaining to harass students and seek to destabilize their confidence in their conclusions.

I do this because, like my spirit animal Socrates himself, I am trying to push students to an edge of understanding where they cannot rely on ideological narratives about the meaning of hard questions and must identify the limit to their own knowledge.

This approach is extremely important when teaching MBAs. Wharton MBAs are talented at so many things. Among their greatest talents is the first answer to a hard question. It doesn’t matter how stark and incommensurable the tradeoffs I have posed, how steeped in history the managerial challenge, how irresolute the CEO in my hypothetical, my students are very quick to provide precise answers that solve every problem.

And those initial answers, as they will be the first to admit, aren’t worth very much. It is only by the fourth or eighth or twelfth round of questions, focused on the same student, do we start to get to a place of understanding, where the consultant’s framing starts to slip away and the real problems, the hard problems, of business ethics start to emerge.

The Socratic dialogue is not optional for students. They can neither opt in nor opt out. The list is randomly generated at the outset of the course and the TA cold calls each participant.

I have learned more from my students in these exchanges than I can possibly summarize. It is astonishing how fresh and new these discussions are, even when the themes of the class—essentially, the conflicts between and among personal, business, and social responsibilities—stay mostly the same.

The class motto

Readers may have heard the rumor that students at elite schools have become special snowflakes who are incapable of receiving critical feedback or hearing opinions that conflict with their own. I read an op-ed from a liberal professor who is now “scared” of his students. That sounds awful. It is also completely foreign to my experience teaching Wharton MBAs. I don’t recognize that caricature.

Part of the reason is that we adopt as a class motto that we will be vulnerable in class, but not fragile. What that means is that we must be willing to speak in rough draft and to give voice to inchoate thoughts, including those that we don’t ultimately embrace. I tell the students that they are forbidden from leading an answer with “I don’t necessarily believe this, but…” That’s a verboten lead-in because I want all of my students to try ideas out in their mouths on an understanding that nothing they say in class can be attributed back to them again outside of it. This stiffer version of Chatham House rules is in place because it permits people the room to make arguments that they don’t typically hear, or, even more, that they don’t typically say. That requires a willingness to go far beyond their comfort zones and be bold in their uncertainty. Even the very act of being on the receiving end of the Socratic dialogues in class requires a certain amount of vulnerability.

But there is a profound difference between vulnerability and fragility. Students can’t be fragile in the give-and-take in my business ethics class because the entire point of these hard questions is to put pressure on assumptions, ideas, ideologies, contested facts, and much else. We want to break each other a bit because we are participating in group pedagogy. The experience of that vulnerability means that we are making each other stronger by the exposure of it.

I have written and deleted four different examples of what I mean here with students who have debated corporate boycotts from the left and right, the hiring and firing of Dylan Mulvaney (the transgender social media personality) by Anheuser Busch, a debate between a leftist student and a conservative Christian about politics in business where they adopted each other’s line of argumentation to revelatory effect, and more.

But I can’t quite do the dynamics at play justice. There is something so powerful, so electric in a classroom where students recognize that nothing is sacred, that everything will be subject to rigorous interrogation, and that we will all leave as friends, having assumed and experienced the good faith and intelligence of our intellectual and ideological interlocutors.

The rhythm of these debates is why I love teaching business ethics at Wharton to MBAs. The raw vulnerability of having these intense discussions at the frontiers of certainty and experience makes every conversation feel new because it is new, with ideas and sentiment that have never been expressed before. That such connections can occur is itself a function of the students’ own boldness and willingness to venture forth without fear of breaking themselves or each other.

In other words: Vulnerability, but without fragility.