Comment: Right signals to applicants, wrong incentives for deans: business school rankings and the challenges to management education
Based on the findings by Dewinney, Dowling and Perm-Ajchariyawong, we point out that, while MBA rankings provide useful signals to students about their salary prospects, they also create misleading incentives for business school administrators. The inbuilt bias in favor of the traditional model of business education discourages innovation and therefore stifles responses to major challenges – such as the globalization of the business education market, the advent of life-long education and the need for more relevance to management practice.
EMBRACING THE SACRED IN OUR SECULAR SCHOLARLY WORLD.
I am honored to speak to you as our sixty-fifth president. Sitting down to prepare my remarks, I realized that I could talk with you about absolutely anything. I decided to talk about us. I hate to say it, but I fear that we are not all that we can be. Please don’t worry—this will not be another presidential address that will call on us to be relevant. We are plenty relevant. The fact is this should be our Golden Age. But something is very amiss. Something is keeping us from being all that we can be. As you can tell from my title, I think that “something” is our reaction to what I am calling our secular world. My goal here is to at least provoke us—and who knows, maybe even to inspire a few of us—to live our lives differently. My address comprises three parts. I will briefly talk about why I think this should be our Golden Age. I will then take a look at our secular world and share what gives me pause. In so doing, I will talk about the audit culture that has emerged around us, our problematic reaction to it, and the consequences of that reaction. And I will close by reminding us of the sacred nature of our work. But I will not just leave it at that. I want to share an idea or two about how to move forward. Some of us will need to summon some courage if we are to live in a world where we can thrive.
Initial Teacher Training: the French view
ABSTRACT This paper, against the background of trends in the development of initial teacher training in Europe as a whole, identifies and explains some of the recent, radical reforms which were introduced in France by a socialist government. These include the need to raise the status and the competence of the teaching profession; the creation of new teacher‐training institutions of university status (Instituts universitaires de formation des maitres); the introduction of common entry qualifications at degree level for both primary and secondary levels; the harmonisation and the extension to 2 years of the post‐degree teacher‐training course and the increase in emphasis placed on professional training, both theoretical and practical. These reforms provoked a storm of protest and an examination of the reasons for this reveals a multiplicity of crucial questions which have far‐reaching implications.