Getting Faculty on Board with Sustainability

Business Schools are increasingly looking at how to embed sustainability into their curricula and in particular core courses. How to get faculty on board is one of the most common questions/concerns relayed by schools as they work in this area. Here are a handful of examples from Denmark, France, Turkey, Germany and the US showing how schools are bringing their faculty together to look at these issues.

• Euromed Management has created CSR faculty officers who are mandated to provide a link between Euromed Management’s CSR Department and their own departments, with at least on representative from each area. Their role is to transmit and disseminate the CSR strategy to their departments, but also to bring ideas and information that may affect the school’s strategy to the attention of management. The CSR Officers have become vectors of Sustainable Development throughout the school. Last year, their commitment resulted in the creation of a student well-being project and working groups on dematerialisation and responsible purchasing.
• Istanbul Bilgi University Department of Business Administration formed a working team consisting of four faculty members from Operations Management, Statistics, Economics and Marketing to look at sustainability. The multi-disciplinary taskforce held various in-depth interviews with faculty members from all the subject areas of the Business Department. During these interviews, they explained the main principles of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) and PRME. Afterwards, the faculty were encouraged to integrate these concepts into their courses.
• At the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business, faculty created “primers” for each academic department to assist faculty with identifying ways to incorporate responsible leadership concepts (e.g. using case studies and readings) into academic frameworks and courses. They also conduct workshops for faculty to learn and discuss this very issue, present leading ideas and promising practices from other institution and firms, and share what others at Smith are already doing.
• For several years now, HHL- Leipzig Graduate School of Management has been gradually expanding its institutional co-teaching (i.e. the joint teaching of courses by faculty from different areas of expertise). Students are very interested in understanding interfaces between different disciplines, such as the interaction between Ethics and Financial Management, Marketing Management, Strategic Management, Accounting, or Logistics Management. Examples include the incorporation of a session on ethical approaches in a marketing management module and the discussion of financial theory from a business ethics point of view.

An Inspirational Guide for the Implementation of PRME: Placing sustainability at the heart of management education, which includes more great examples of how schools are engaging faculty and addressing other common questions/concerns related to embedding sustainability, will be launched at PRME’s 3^rd Global Forum at Rio+20 in June.