Note: Faculty Focus is a monthly series that highlights faculty whose compelling passions, innovative ideas and various areas of expertise help weave together the fabric of Brock University’s vibrant community. For more from the series, click here.

Paul Dunn remembers what it was like as though it were yesterday.

The Goodman School of Business Professor of Ethics still recalls dragging himself to evening classes in Toronto as an accounting student after a long day of work, trying to further his education and better his life.

“I took some really awful, boring business courses, and after working a full day you had to listen to a monotone accounting professor drone on for three hours,” he says. “It was painful.”

The experience motivated Dunn to take a different approach to teaching his own students.

“I have a high level of energy, so I always volunteer to teach in the evenings because I can make my classes stimulating and interesting,” he says. “I’m very sympathetic to any student who has been working all day long and then has to show up for a night class.”

His career focuses on piquing the interest of students in the business world, but it’s a far cry from where his path began.

Growing up in Toronto, Dunn wasn’t sure where life was going to take him when he graduated high school.

He headed to the University of Toronto for general arts programming, hoping to find a passion he could turn into a career.

“I was taking courses in math, economics, philosophy, political science and English,” he says. “I had no idea whatsoever what I wanted to do.”

As it turned out, philosophy was where Dunn initially found his fit.

“It’s one of those things where if you get interested in something, you tend to do well at it, because you like doing it,” he says. “So, each year I just kept taking more and more philosophy courses.”

Dunn went on to earn both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in philosophy, but his career trajectory remained unclear.

“My oldest brother suggested that even though I didn’t know anything about business, perhaps I should consider accounting,” he recalls.

With no experience under his belt, Dunn walked into Clarkson Gordon —the premier accounting firm in Canada at the time — to speak with the hiring partner.

“I explained that I knew nothing about accounting, but was interested in business,” Dunn says. “He thought that anybody who had a master’s degree in philosophy was someone they wanted to work with. He said, ‘We can train you in the nuts and bolts; we want people who know how to think.’ And so, I was hired.”

Working for the firm during the day, Dunn immediately began taking night courses and working toward his chartered accountancy designation.

After reaching that goal, he spent about a dozen years in the financial industry in downtown Toronto, looking for the job that made him excited to go to work.

He found it when he began teaching financial accounting part time at York University.

The experience was enough to encourage Dunn to quit his day job and head back to school to get his PhD in Accounting from Boston University in hopes of a career move into academia.

In 1998, he joined Brock University’s Goodman School of Business.

Through his research, Dunn has been able to combine his philosophy training with his practical experience as a professional accountant, focusing on the area of business ethics.

The field has grown considerably and gained significant traction over the years, which has been “very rewarding” to see, he says.

“Now, at almost every respectable business school, including Goodman, business ethics is a mandatory course,” Dunn says. “It’s required for a good reason. The decisions that business leaders make have such a huge impact on society, and it’s critical that they are aware of the social and ethical dimensions of their economic decisions.”

He hopes to instil in his students that every economic decision has a social consequence.

“It may be large, or it may be small, but every economic decision is going to have an impact on another human being,” Dunn says.

“It’s absolutely essential that all of our students, our future business leaders, have a solid understanding of the importance of considering the ethical aspects of their business decisions. They still may opt to go for the economics when making a choice, but at least they’re acknowledging the social consequences of those economic decisions.”

Dunn believes there are many lessons to be learned from the mistakes and successes of business leaders and works to share them with both his students and the community.

His business ethics textbook is filled with case studies based on true stories and he spends time each week discussing current business issues on the radio with the Tom McConnell Show on Newstalk 610 CKTB.