CU Business Law Case Study

I’m attaching Case Study as a word file. Let me know if you have any questions.

Please use this strategy when you analyze a case study:

1.   Identify and write the main issues found discussed in the case (who, what, how, where, when, and why — the critical facts in a case).

2.   List all indicators (including stated “problems”) that something is not as expected or as desired.

3.   Briefly analyze the issue with theories found in your textbook or other academic materials. Decide which ideas, models, and theories seem useful. Apply these conceptual tools to the situation. As new information is revealed, cycle back to sub steps a and b.

4.   Identify the areas that need improvement (use theories from your textbook)

o    Specify and prioritize the criteria used to choose action alternatives.

o    Discover or invent feasible action alternatives.

o    Examine the probable consequences of action alternatives.

o    Select a course of action.

o    Design and implementation plan/schedule.

o    Create a plan for assessing the action to be implemented.

5.   Conclusion (every paper should end with a strong conclusion or summary)

Case 2.1Hacking into Harvard
Everyone who has ever applied for admission to a selective college
or who has been interviewed for a highly desired job knows the
feeling of waiting impatiently to learn the result of one’s application.
So it’s not hard to identify with those applicants to some of the
nation’s most prestigious MBA programs who thought they had a
chance to get an early glimpse at whether their ambition was to be
fulfilled. While visiting a Businessweek Online message board, they
found instructions, posted by an anonymous hacker, explaining how
to find out what admission decision the business schools had made
in their case. Doing so wasn’t hard. The universities in question—
Harvard, Dartmouth, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Stanford—
used the same application software from Apply Yourself, Inc.
Essentially, all one had to do was change the very end of the
applicant-specific URL to get to the supposedly restricted page
containing the verdict on one’s application. In the nine hours it took
Apply Yourself programmers to patch the security flaw after it was
posted, curiosity got the better of about 200 applicants, who couldn’t
resist the temptation to discover whether they had been admitted.
Some of them got only blank screens. But others learned that they
had been tentatively accepted or tentatively rejected. What they
didn’t count on, however, were two things: first, that it wouldn’t take
the business schools long to learn what had happened and who had
done it and, second, that the schools in question were going to be
very unhappy about it. Harvard was perhaps the most outspoken.
Kim B. Clark, dean of the business school, said, “This behavior is
unethical at best—a serious breach of trust that cannot be countered
by rationalization.” In a similar vein, Steve Nelson, the executive
director of Harvard’s MBA program, stated, “Hacking into a system in
this manner is unethical and also contrary to the behavior we expect
of leaders we aspire to develop.”
It didn’t take Harvard long to make up its mind what to do about it. It
rejected all 119 applicants who had attempted to access the
information. In an official statement, Dean Clark wrote that the
mission of the Harvard Business School “is to educate principled
leaders who make a difference in the world. To achieve that, a person
must have many skills and qualities, including the highest standards
of integrity, sound judgment and a strong moral compass—an
intuitive sense of what is right and wrong. Those who have hacked
into this web site have failed to pass that test.” Carnegie Mellon and
MIT quickly followed suit. By rejecting the ethically challenged, said
Richard L. Schmalensee, dean of MIT’s Sloan School of Management,
the schools are trying to “send a message to society as a whole that
we are attempting to produce people that when they go out into the
world, they will behave ethically.”
Duke and Dartmouth, where only a handful of students gained access
to their files, said they would take a case-by-case approach and
didn’t publicly announce their individualized determinations. But,
given the competition for places in their MBA programs, it’s a safe
bet that few, if any, offending applicants were sitting in classrooms
the following semester. Forty-two applicants attempted to learn
their results early at Stanford, which took a different tack. It invited
the accused hackers to explain themselves in writing. “In the best
case, what has been demonstrated here is a lack of judgment; in the
worst case, a lack of integrity,” said Derrick Bolton, Stanford’s
director of MBA admissions. “One of the things we try to teach at
business schools is making good decisions and taking responsibility
for your actions.” Six weeks later, however, the dean of Stanford
Business School, Robert Joss, reported, “None of those who gained
unauthorized access was able to explain his or her actions to our
satisfaction.” He added that he hoped the applicants “might learn
from their experience.”
Given the public’s concern over the wave of corporate scandals in
recent years and its growing interest in corporate social
responsibility, business writers and other media commentators
warmly welcomed Harvard’s decisive response. But soon there was
some sniping at the decision by those claiming that Harvard and the
other business schools had overreacted. Although 70 percent of
Harvard’s MBA students approved the decision, the undergraduate
student newspaper, The Crimson, was skeptical. “HBS [Harvard
Business School] has scored a media victory with its hard-line
stance,” it said in an editorial. “Americans have been looking for a
sign from the business community, particularly its leading
educational institutions, that business ethics are a priority. HBS’s
false bravado has given them one, leaving 119 victims in angry
hands.”
As some critics pointed out, Harvard’s stance overlooked the
possibility that the hacker might have been a spouse or a parent who
had access to the applicant’s password and personal identification
number. In fact, one applicant said that this had happened to him. His
wife found the instructions at Businessweek Online and tried to check
on the success of his application. “I’m really distraught over this,” he
said. “My wife is tearing her hair out.” To this, Harvard’s Dean Clark
responds, “We expect applicants to be personally responsible for the
access to the website, and for the identification and passwords they
receive.”
Critics also reject the idea that the offending applicants were
“hackers.” After all, they used their own personal identification and
passwords to log on legitimately; all they did was to modify the URL
to go to a different page. They couldn’t change anything in their files
or view anyone else’s information. In fact, some critics blamed the
business schools and Apply Yourself more than they did the
applicants. If those pages were supposed to be restricted, then it
shouldn’t have been so easy to find one’s way to them.
In an interview, one of the Harvard applicants said that although he
now sees that what he did was wrong, he wasn’t thinking about that
at the time—he just followed the hacker’s posted instructions out of
curiosity. He didn’t consider what he did to be “hacking,” because
any novice could have done the same thing. “I’m not an IT person by
any stretch of the imagination,” he said. “I’m not even a great typist.”
He wrote the university a letter of apology. “I admitted that I got
curious and had a lapse in judgment,” he said. “I pointed out that I
wasn’t trying to harm anyone and wasn’t trying to get an advantage
over anyone.” Another applicant said that he knew he had made a
poor judgment but he was offended by having his ethics called into
question. “I had no idea that they would have considered this a big
deal.” And some of those posting messages at Businessweek
Online and other MBA-related sites believe the offending applicants
should be applauded. “Exploiting weaknesses is what good business
is all about. Why would they ding you?” wrote one anonymous
poster.
Dean Schmalensee of MIT, however, defends Harvard and MIT’s
automatically rejecting everyone who peeked “because it wasn’t an
impulsive mistake.” “The instructions are reasonably elaborate,” he
said. “You didn’t need a degree in computer science, but this clearly
involved effort. You couldn’t do this casually without knowing that
you were doing something wrong. We’ve always taken ethics
seriously, and this is a serious matter.” To those applicants who say
that they didn’t do any harm, Schmalensee replies, “Is there nothing
wrong with going through files just because you can?”
To him and others, seeking unauthorized access to restricted pages
is as wrong as snooping through your boss’s desk to see whether
you’ve been recommended for a raise. Some commentators,
however, suggest there may be a generation gap here. Students who
grew up with the Internet, they say, tend to see it as a wide-open
territory and don’t view this level of web snooping as indicating a
character flaw.
Discussion Questions
1. Suppose that you had been one of the MBA applicants who stumbled across
an opportunity to learn your results early. What would you have done, and
why? Would you have considered it a moral decision? If so, on what basis
would you have made it?
2. Assess the morality of what the curious applicants did from the point of view
of egoism, utilitarianism, Kant’s ethics, Ross’s pluralism, and rule
utilitarianism.
3. In your view, was it wrong for the MBA applicants to take an unauthorized
peek at their application files? Explain why you consider what they did
morally permissible or impermissible. What obligations, ideals, and effects
should the applicants have considered? Do you think, as some have
suggested, that there is a generation gap on this issue?
4. Did Harvard and MIT overreact, or was it necessary for them to respond as
they did in order to send a strong message about the importance of ethics? If
you were a business-school admissions official, how would you have handled
this situation?
5. Assess the argument that the applicants who snooped were just engaging in
the type of bold and aggressive behavior that makes for business success. In
your view, are these applicants likely to make good business leaders? What
about the argument that it’s really the fault of the universities for not having
more secure procedures and not the fault of the applicants who took
advantage of that fact?
6. One of the applicants admits that he used poor judgment but believes that his
ethics should not be questioned. What do you think he means? If he exercised
poor judgment on a question of right and wrong, isn’t that a matter of his
ethics? Stanford’s Derrick Bolton distinguishes between a lapse of judgment
and a lack of integrity. What do you see as the difference? Based on this
episode, what, if anything, can we say about the ethics and the character of
the curious applicants?