Eccles Visiting Scholar Discusses Leadership for the 21st Century

Published: November 03, 2015 | Author: Porter Sproul | Read Time: 1 minutes

Whistleblower Cynthia Cooper has been invited to present at Southern University as the year’s first Eccles Visiting Scholar. In 2002, Cooper was named one of Time magazine’s “person of the year” for her role in unraveling the fraud at WorldCom. As an internal auditor, Cooper saw it as her ethical duty to present the $3.8 billion accounting fraud she and her team discovered to WorldCom’s board of directors.

Sowing panic among their investors, WorldCom filed for bankruptcy protection. After WorldCom eliminated their shareholders, the public demanded immediate action. Congress complied, passing the law known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to protect. Now, with the publication of her new book, Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistle-blower, we receive an inside account of what happened at WorldCom. Cooper's story has been told before, most notably in The Wall Street Journal and in a prepared report to WorldCom's board of directors.

These days, Cooper spends most of her time talking to high school students and college students, urging them to be prepared for that moment when an ethical choice presents itself. "People don't often realize that they're facing a dilemma," Cooper says. "There are a lot of pressures that come to bear in the workplace, and people should prepare beforehand.”

Cynthia Cooper’s presentation on, “Ethical Leadership for the 21st Century,” will take place on Thursday, November 5, at 11:30 a.m. in the Great Hall within the R. Haze Hunter Conference Center. Cynthia Cooper is the final speaker for the fall series of SUU Convocations. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Southern Utah University Ethics Speaking Series.

All SUU Convocations are free and open to the campus and general public.

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