Students, administrators, and alumni gathered Monday night in the Irish Room in Gasson Hall to hear this semester's Clough Colloquium guest speaker, Cynthia Cooper, as she addressed the issues of ethics and corporate accountability.
Cooper served as vice president for internal audit for the telecommunications company WorldCom, which made national news in 2002 when Cooper and her team of auditors discovered accounting frauds within the company's records. The investigation following the discovery led to the exposure of the largest corporate accounting fraud in history. Cooper was named one of Time magazine's People of the Year in 2002 along with Coleen Rowley, an FBI agent, and Sherron Watkins, the former vice president of Enron Corporation who alerted then-CEO Ken Lay to accounting irregularities within the company. Rowley and Watkins were acknowledged for their own roles in uncovering incompetency and fraud in the FBI and Enron, respectively. Cooper is also the author of the book Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower.
The event was sponsored by the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics, an organization within the Carroll School of Management (CSOM) that conducts research, programming, and offers education models focused on leadership and ethics. The Clough Colloquium is one of several series produced by the Winston Center and is funded by Charles Clough, BC '64.
Introductions were made by Richard Keeley, associate dean of CSOM, and Cutberto Garza, University provost and dean of faculties. Cooper began the lecture by discussing ethics and morality in the workplace and the home and then progressed into an account of her time at WorldCom. "We all have to consider how the choices we make on a daily basis have compounding consequences," Cooper said in her address to the audience. "We need to understand the mindset of complacency with unethical behavior that allowed this fraud to occur." Cooper engaged the audience by using the energy and participation of audience members to demonstrate different psychological principles that contribute to unethical behavior.
Spring Break
