Kelley School’s annual Indiana Business School Conference on the theme of Environment and Energy is being held next week at Indianapolis. Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris is one of the panelists talking at the conference. Given the disastrous environmental record of Dow Chemical, this invitation by the business school sets a poor example to students on corporate ethical and social standards.\nDow has a terrible history of environmental negligence endangering human life. Hundreds of residents in Midland, Michigan, were affected by the company’s dumping dioxin in the Tittabawassee River. Thousands of veterans were exposed to Agent Orange manufactured by Dow. Two hundred thousand people in Bhopal, India, who survived the world’s worst industrial disaster in 1984 are slowly poisoned by toxic waste seeping into the ground from the factory site of Union Carbide, now fully owned by Dow Chemical. Dow will not clean up their mess but can talk about the environment at conferences?\nWhile the business school has been sympathetic after being contacted, it is disappointing they invited Liveris without adequate thought. Now, over 1,000 attendees and business school students get Dow’s spin on their environmental stewardship. This is yet another incident of IU departments associating with companies with shallow social, moral and ethical standards. Last semester, the School of Informatics hosted Dow Agrosciences and Dow Corning to their career fair and I have seen e-mails from the school on job openings there. It is not just fundraising and job-placement statistics that should matter to the schools, but also the examples they set for students to make them responsible leaders in the community.
Yogesh L. Simmhan\nDoctoral student
