Column: No more excuses for bad ethics

The information age has had a bit of an unexpected effect on large organizations: forced transparency.

That is, whether companies like it or not, shady actions come to light (and stay there on the internet forever).

Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks are famous examples of this, and organizational conspiracies make it to the front page of Reddit every other day. It’s trendy to bring deep, dark secrets to light. As the information age progresses, ethics will become less an issue of public relations — it will become more necessary for companies to actually be ethical.

The Mormon Church itself released documents admitting that its founder had 40 wives; the CIA has torture reports going through the Senate; the UK police are only beginning to uncover VIP pedophilia rings from the ’70s and ’80s. The Koch Brothers are starting to get into good causes by funding reforms of the criminal justice system, undoubtedly hoping to combat the fact that a Google search sometimes suggests “evil” right after “Koch Brothers.”

The internet is giving us more of a lowdown on which companies are totally backward, self-serving organizations, and which are only kind of corrupt. College students should take advantage of this new age of forced transparency by being intentional about who they decide to work for.

So here’s a cliched, Disney-movie message: Work for the least corrupt organization you can, even if it means losing a few bucks. That tune is bland and familiar to the ears of college students, and it’s easy to say when speaking among idealists in a classroom. But when talking about our own job searches, things suddenly become ... complicated. We want high-paying jobs, right? Prestige? Prestige feels good.

The best and brightest who have a choice of where to work are the single most valuable resource to the economy, and they should be obliged to be choosey about who they work for. A progressive environment like UNC encourages students to do good in the world, and I think that any graduate who isn’t a complete narcissist at least aspires to make the world a better place. UNC has its fair share of students researching African health care, maintaining a 4.0 and revolutionizing the world through symbolic showcases in the Pit.

But every Morehead-Cain Scholar who decides to work for McKinsey or Bain ought to ask him or herself whether a shiny job in management consulting will really improve anything. In their job searches, computer programmers should note that Palantir was accused of a plot to hack and blackmail WikiLeaks.

Similarly, that savvy two-year stint for Teach for America ought to be preceded by sharp questions about how much damage Teach for America is actually doing to poor communities.

This attraction of high achievers to prestigious, yet socially useless (or even harmful) jobs is precisely what caused a former secretary of labor to call Ivy League schools a “ludicrous waste of resources.”

Don’t be a wasted resource.