With the world financial crisis giving MBA students across Canada more talking points than usual, one MBA school in British Columbia is trying to inject a little faith into the discourse.
Trinity Western University, a private Christian, liberal arts school in Langley, about 50 kilometres east of Vancouver, began its MBA program in August 2007 and will see its first graduates next summer.
Program director Mark Lee says while Christian ethics is a thread that runs through the entire business department, it does not overwhelm the MBA studies.
"If you look at the MBAs here at Trinity Western versus most other MBAs, it's probably about 95 per cent similar. A lot of the course work is the same, a lot of the case studies," he says.
What distinguishes a Trinity Western MBA from those offered by other universities is that students explore faith and belief in terms of what it means to run a business.
It's a unique approach, says Mr. Lee, who has been with the university for three years and previously worked on more traditional MBA programs in Alberta.
"As we like to say, it isn't so much how we do business, though that's a huge part of it, but it's also why we do it the way we do. In my experience with other MBA programs, it was certainly something that was never talked about but it was very real."
Only one of the Trinity Western program's 15 courses, titled Christian Leadership and Ethics, has an overtly religious theme.
"It gets quite philosophical, but in many ways it is important to be able to do some soul searching because a lot of times in business we are dealing with the grey zone," Mr. says. "There are a lot of things that we do in leading businesses that really aren't black and white."
Trinity Western wants to provide an "ethical polar north" to the students' moral compass, he explains.
"To make difficult decisions, like downsizing staff, is one of the most gut-wrenching things you go through as a leader. How do you still be a person of integrity when you are trying to make difficult decisions? There are no easy answers, but we talk about this," he says.
"Is it more than just words, in terms of what a company does? It's now, when the times are hard, that you find out whether [a company policy] is more than words."
Mr. Lee says one answer that came from students who adopt this approach is that by treating employees as valued assets, ethical companies look for alternatives to traditional layoffs — such as moving to four-day work weeks, for example, to save jobs.
Trinity Western has 30 students are taking part in the 22-month program, for which tuition is $28,000. Most of the students who joined the program at its start last year are already employed in business management or hold similar positions in the non-profit sector, the two areas of work for which the Trinity Western MBA is designed.
The length of the program was chosen to allow students to continue their with their business or non-profit careers, says Mr. Lee, who describes the 22-month term as "something in between full- and part-time for the working professional."
The program begins in August on campus, switches to online teaching in the fall and spring terms, and is followed by more on-campus tutelage in early summer. The process is repeated the following school year, with an applied project being carried out the following May, in place of a thesis.
In January, another 30 MBA students will join the program, which will also see the launch of an International MBA specialty. Trinity Western, founded in 1962, has 2,700 undergraduate students and offers 16 graduate and post-grad degrees. Mr. Lee emphasizes that while the school is Christian-oriented, its students are multi-denominational and hold a wide array of views.
"We've got people of all sorts of faiths, and of no faith as well. We have students from Asia, from the Middle East. ... These differences are part of the conversation," he says. "It's just who we are, it's as natural as breathing."
Mr. Lee believes his MBA students are attracted simply by the potential of talking about faith in the classroom.
"A lot of the public universities are prohibited from talking about some of these issues for any number of political-correctness sort of reasons… whereas we are unapologetic about how one's faith and belief does impact one's decisions," he says.
"You are trying to do right in the work force. With that is a huge obligation, a stewardship to be wise in the use of these people and develop them as far as possible in their careers. This is what we try to teach."
Special to The Globe and Mail
