Here's former Hewlett-Packard board chairwoman Patricia Dunn testifying before a congressional committee probing the company's use of “pretexting” to investigate its own board. “I do not accept personal responsibility for what happened,” she says. And then Ann Baskins, HP's former general counsel and nine other witnesses all take the Fifth Amendment.

Here's former WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers reporting to jail for his role in an $11 billion accounting fraud. These and other headlines are part of perhaps the biggest perp walk in business history.

Oh, and here's one more item — an interesting recent study by Donald McCabe, professor of management and global business at Rutgers University: Among all graduate students, MBA candidates are the biggest cheaters. That's right, it must be a coincidence. So let's dig a little deeper.

According to survey data from 623 students at 32 graduate business schools in the USA and Canada, 56% admitted cheating. But, as McCabe notes, it's not cheating for cheating's sake: These students are doing it to win. Cheating can help them get great internships and high-paying jobs at big name companies. So maybe it isn't a coincidence. Even so, that doesn't answer the deeper question: What's wrong with the business world — and, in particular, what is wrong with business schools?

Difference in 'professions'

Part of the answer could lie in the history of business graduate schools. The MBA is a fairly recent invention, unlike the other “professions” with graduate degrees. The oldest graduate school for business in the USA is a little more than 100 years old; Europe's oldest is only a bit more than 40 years old. Compare that with law and medicine. Law schools date to the Roman Republic. And though lawyers might not have the best reputation, at least the American Bar Association has issued its Model Rules of Professional Conduct. Medicine goes back farther, even if you consider only Western medicine. Hippocrates of Cos, who lived in the age of Pericles, is widely considered “the father of Medicine.” Science might have advanced, but Hippocrates lives on today in the Hippocratic Oath, which proscribes a moral basis for doctors (unlike the hypocritical oath that evidently offers business school students a free pass).

So perhaps part of the difference between these schools is what it means to be a profession. But there is also a wider gap that separates business from medicine and law. Business school professors and leaders have yet to answer a question of the first order: What's the point of the exercise?

In the case of medicine and law, there are higher purposes. Doctors work to heal the sick and provide comfort to their patients. Lawyers are charged with representing their clients and also with upholding the nation's laws. What about business men and women? What's their higher purpose?

The ads in The Economist offer a good idea of the missions that leading business schools assign themselves. The ad for the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business says, “You'll experience the people and ideas responsible for revolutionizing the business world.” How perfectly it complements Harvard Business School's mission: “We educate leaders who make a difference in the world.” Jeffrey Skilling, an HBS graduate, was after all, a leader who made a “difference.” As President Bush, another HBS alum, would say, “Mission accomplished.”

At least these ads are consistent with what today's businessmen have taken as their key responsibility: Increasing a company's share price. Or, as Jack Welch so succinctly put it in the title of his recent book, Winning. But winning, as we've seen with CEOs and now with business school students, can become a rationale for cheating.

What if, instead of seeking to create shareholder value as their definition of success, business men and women sought to establish well-articulated social values — and then applied them to their own careers and organizations? What if, instead of writing books called “Winning,” they called their books “Contributing”? And what if, instead of measuring success only by their ability to amass financial capital, they also sought to grow social capital?

Because the real problem with business today isn't the few scoundrels who bring disgrace to so many honest managers. The real problem is that it needs to serve a higher purpose than making a lot of money. The challenge today is to answer a fundamental question: Is capitalism going to be the salvation of the world? Or the cause of its demise?

The big picture

This is hardly an academic question, what with issues of global warming, the growing gap between the haves and have-nots, and the seeds of war and terrorism sown by divergent economic systems. Business leaders need to espouse a bigger game than just winning that connects to a view of the world as an interconnected community, where the future of the wealthiest depends in equal measure on the future of the poorest.

MBA students need to think about this bigger game that asks fundamental questions about the purpose and sustainability of business. And it's a game that will eliminate most cheating — unless, to paraphrase Woody Allen, students who want to serve a higher purpose cheat by looking at the soul of the student next to them.

Alan M. Webber is co-founding editor of Fast Company magazine and former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review.