Apprentices of ethics: at Colorado Christian U, business integrity trumps showmanship.

FOISTING THE MANEUVERINGS OF THE American board room on prime-time viewers, NBC's reality show, "The Apprentice," has captivated myriad fans, turned unknown people such as Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth into overnight celebrities and made Donald Trump's "You're fired!" a household phrase.

But, despite the show's success, cynicism and hostility toward American business is high. The Chicago public-relations firm Golin/Harris recently completed a corporate citizenship survey of 2,770 Americans that revealed seven out of 10 "have a crisis in confidence in the way we do business in America."

Enter the School of Business and Leadership at Colorado Christian University. This four-year liberal arts school in Lakewood is turning out graduates trained not only in accounting and finance, but in ethics and good corporate citizenship as well.

"Leadership is more than a technical ability to influence others to accomplish goals," CCU President Larry Donnithorne said. "It implies using one's influence to lift people and improve society and individuals."

Donnithorne, a retired West Point general, has been president of CCU for seven years and makes no apologies for the school's Judeo-Christian values. "We don't insist that students agree with our world view," Donnithorne said, "but truth-telling, promise-keeping, justice and beneficence are all core values that are attractive to everyone."

CCU's School of Business and Leadership has 236 undergrad students and 71 graduate students. All of the business school's professors (15 full-time faculty and 11 adjunct professors) either came from or are still involved in the business world.

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Charles King, a former FBI agent, Samsonite executive and an attorney, is the dean of the business school and the founder of the Values-Aligned Leadership Summit, now in its third year. King started the conference after noticing a sense of hopelessness in students when it came to questions about ethics and corporate citizenship.

"We needed to show students that there were role-models out there in the business community who were both successful and ethical," King said. "There are no companies out there with bad values, but the systems in place do not encourage good values," he said.

So, in an effort to expose CCU business students to Fortune 500 corporate executives and vice versa, and to open a dialogue between educators and the business community, King began organizing the Values summit.

The conference pairs CCU students with executives for a one-day event to explore issues facing America's corporate leaders and to design a model for making good decisions. The list of speakers and panelists is impressive: Samuel Addoms, chairman of Frontier Airlines; Eric Pillmoore, senior vice president for governance at Tyco; and Scott Bemis, publisher of The Denver Business Journal.

What began as a group of 80 CCU students and 80 executives gathering in 2003 burgeoned into 120 of each in 2004. King hopes to host 200 students and 200 execs by inviting other universities to participate in 2005.

King says that he has noticed corporations that hire CCU grads--Allstate, Intuit Corp. and Enterprise, to name a few--rate them as 'great employees' with high ethical values.

The Golin/Harris survey found that trust is fundamental to American business, primarly because American consumers carry ethical baggage--they tend to think business should be about making good things happen for everyone.

That's the sort of baggage that could get you a ride on the down elevator on "The Apprentice." But it's the way up at Colorado Christian.