On Wednesday night, Jon Stewart lampooned the MBA Oath established by a group of second-year students at Harvard Business School. Earlier, the Harvard Crimson reported that as a result of the financial apocalypse, Maxwell Anderson, now an HBA graduate, had drafted a Boy Scout-esque pledge, which was then signed by hundreds of fellow graduates. A few lines:

I will act with utmost integrity and pursue my work in an ethical manner.

I will safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate.

I will take responsibility for my actions, and I will represent the performance and risks of my enterprise accurately and honestly.

But this little tree-house word of honor didn’t fly with many other future Kenneth Lays. In an interview with the Daily Show’s John Oliver, Bruce Kogut, a business professor at Columbia, admitted that “not a very high percentage” of his students considered taking the oath. Oliver then spoke with a group of Harvard and MIT MBA students who found the oath contradictory to what they’ve been taught to “be responsible to shareholders.” One guy commented, “I feel that ethics is a really fuzzy subject.” When asked if she feared going to jail in the future for possibly using illegal profiting tactics, one Harvard student piped up with no reservations:

It’s important to be a little bit of an asshole sometimes.

Scout’s honor, indeed. See the video after the jump.