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The relevance of B schools

by Robert Teitelman  |  Published April 26, 2011 at 10:37 AM
hollowbook125X100.jpgThe Financial Times Monday offers up one of the well-worn chestnuts of business reporting under the headline, "Academia strives for relevance." The academia in question, of course, is that of the business schools. The piece asks a question that's been kicked around probably as long as universities began to set up trade schools within their blooming groves: What matters more, making yourself useful to managers or studying the "subject" -- finance, marketing, organizational behavior -- or seeking the approval of your peers, that is, other professors of business? Given what an eternal argument this is, why bother to ponder this? Mostly because this tension between the traditional role of the university as a haven of the liberal arts and the powerfully ascendant view of universities as centers of career training, embodied by the remarkable growth in business as a subject over the last half century, has been rising in tandem with fiscal pressures and tuition increases. The signs are all over the place, notably in the regular attempts to try to draw conclusions about the "usefulness" and thus feasibility of academic disciplines by examining future career earnings. Need it be said? The traditional view of the liberal arts was that it had little to do with utility, that it was a kind of training for the life of the mind. Few academics fully accept that image of the university as a monastic retreat from the real world in its pure form any more; most want, at some level or the other, to participate and shape the world outside the gates, a matter of occasional controversy. Many, indeed, are formidable entrepreneurs. But the caricature of the ivory tower persists.  
 
In all this swirling debate, however, business and the business schools make up a special case. Business is, by its very nature, utilitarian: It's about making money. The FT finds it so easy to caricature the conflict between dreaming academics doing long-term studies that only their colleagues care about and businesses that require real-life problems solved probably because that reductionist conflict is so well accepted by "customers" for B school services themselves. Packed in that cliché-ridden sentence is a series of tasks business academics are expected to shoulder effectively: research, teaching, consulting, fundraising. Many do seem to juggle those tasks effectively -- though at what level of quality is difficult to discern since it's very hard to tell what the standard is. Business schools do tend to get blamed for every corporate scandal and economic meltdown (not unlike journalism), as if a better class in ethics or more rigor would eliminate the chronic cyclicality, temptations and failures of capitalism.
 
But business schools find themselves trapped in a dilemma that they, again, share with journalism: their audience. How do they deal with that audience? Do they attempt to shape it and lead it on, offering material it doesn't realize it yet wants? Or do they try to provide exactly what that audience craves at that moment? The FT quotes Dan Leclair, a senior vice president of a major accreditor of business schools: "The deans have been telling us that major donors are asking tough questions like 'you have all these faculty members who you are very proud of, but can you tell me how all this research has made a difference?' "
 
The FT then rumbles through all the ways the schools are trying to convince business folks that they do make a difference: targeted teaching; research prizes for "relevant" research; and that usual bureaucratic response to any crisis, new ways of evaluating faculty to measure their "managerial relevance" -- that is, new standards to meet new demands (the FT fails to mention it, but obviously the biggest strategy here is the oldest: vast amounts of glossy PR). But the FT then admits exactly what "managerially relevance" means to those all-important managers: consulting. The FT cracks the window to let in the fresh air of truth when it talks to Prof. Bob Dammon at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh: "A few years ago, Tepper started a programme in which faculty worked with companies on specific problems. But it became clear that the two sides were interested in different things. The faculty wanted to have a bigger impact by generating the solution, whereas the companies wanted consulting-type services. Our experience is that companies are focused on short-term problems while faculties are looking more at the long-term."
 
Again, the schools are caught in the middle. They either get accused of engaging in the crass peddling of popular how-to management books -- and many of their biggest stars are slick proselytizers of obvious management nostrums -- for a business audience eager for advice, or they're viewed as a bunch of rarified intellectuals who obviously ended up in academia because they lacked the enterprise and shrewdness to make heaps of money in the real world. If they meet the short-term demands of their "customers," they seem more and more out of place in an academic setting, even one that may be drifting in the direction of utility. If they try to provide longer-term research or -- remember when this was mostly what they were expected to do? -- superior teaching, they are viewed as "irrelevant," and the dollars cease to flow. As a result, they continually dance between these poles, mixing flim-flam with substance in various proportions.
 
Does anybody care about the students? Certainly. But students, like the schools, are also engaged in a utility-maximizing approach. What matters generally is less the educational content than the credential they receive and the dollars attached to that credential by desired future employers. It's the brand, man. There's no escape from the judgment, as short-term and self-interested as they are, of those future employers and donors.
 
Again, the plight of the business schools (and we shouldn't feel very sorry for them: they've been growing like crazy all over the world) speaks to a larger set of issues not just in academia but in business itself. Is there something beyond the treacherous expedience of the short-term? Customers may always be "right," but they can lead you right over the cliff as well. Isn't a tight coupling, a kind of mirroring, between B schools and business the very recipe for the mutually affirming consensus we know as a bubble? How in this world seemingly possessed by the logic of democratic counting -- surveys, polls, search results, clicks, votes, tallies -- can you escape the frenzy of the moment and build something more meaningful and more permanent? That's one question for business schools to wrestle with. Don't wait for an answer. - Robert Teitelman
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Tags: Bob Dammon | business school | Carnegie Mellon University | Dan Leclair | Financial Times | Tepper School of Business
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