Are Business Schools to Blame?
Posted on March 18th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »
On TNR. com, Bradford Plumer looks at the role business schools have played in the current financial crisis.
…the usually prim Financial Times mocked the champagne-swigging alumni at Harvard Business School’s 100-year anniversary gala as they quietly squirmed over their responsibility for the mess. (“We will leave the talk of fixing the blame to others,” Harvard’s dean assured the gathering.)
…across the country, business-school faculties are grappling with the possibility that they’ve been instilling generations of students with a naive faith in free markets, teaching them to focus solely on short-term profits, and justifying some of the more outrageous executive-compensation schemes that have become Exhibit A in the case against corporate America.
And as with Harvard Medical School, part of the problem at HBS is how the close ties that biz school professors have with industry have corrupted influenced what is taught there.
Nor were faculty members sounding as many warnings about Wall Street as they could have. “Our tendency was just to get excited by the novelty-and by our belief that markets could do no wrong,” says Jay Lorsch, a professor of human relations at Harvard Business School. Lorsch points out that most MBA programs have to maintain friendly ties with the corporate world-professors often consult on the side and work closely with companies to develop case studies, while business schools depend on big firms to send students to their executive programs. “This all created a tendency to go along with the business community, to not be too critical.”
Pretty damning, and good for Jay Lorsch for being candid.
One thing that Drew Faust could do, might make her a great president, is to launch a university-wide examination of Harvard’s relationship to the private sector—a soul-search, if you will.
Given the economic crisis the university is undergoing, and the way in which the nation is reconsidering basic aspects about capitalism it once took for granted, this would be an opportune time to commence such a project.
7 Responses
3/18/2009 8:54 am
You are kidding?
3/18/2009 9:03 am
Absolutely not. Let’s see. You have an endowment in freefall which is redefining the identity of the university, an Allston campus, now shut down, that was essentially intended to pursue federal and private money, controversy at the med school over ties to drug companies, and controversy at the biz school over ties to Wall Street. What’s the common denominator here?
3/18/2009 9:06 am
One thing that DF could do with HBS is look at the problems that the current dean has with the role of women at the school. Why is she avoiding the issue.
3/18/2009 9:08 am
What’s the issue?
3/18/2009 9:38 am
Junior woman professors are beat up (figuratively of course) by male students and others.
Why is that type of behavior tolerated at such a great school.
Ask some of the prominent women alums what they’ve heard from junior professors.
3/18/2009 1:56 pm
Hello, Crimson?
3/18/2009 7:59 pm
If Faust does that she might not be around long enough to be considered a “great president.” However, she might get invited to more dinner parties hosted by Chuck and Barbara Grassley, this after she bears witness to 3/4 of the staff at 124 Mt. Auburn keel over and die from massive coronaries after they attempt to explain her plan to alumni(ae) and/or donors.