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.
How business schools lost their way.
Business schools are facing intense criticism for failing to impart useful skills, failing to prepare leaders, failing to instill norms of ethical behavior--and even failing to lead graduates to good corporate jobs. These criticisms come not just from students, employers, and the media but also from deans of some of America's most prestigious B schools. The root cause oftoday's crisis in management education, assert Warren G. Bennis and James O'Toole, is that business schools have adopted an inappropriate--and ultimately self-defeating--model of academic excellence. Instead of measuring themselves in terms of the competence of their graduates, or by how well their faculty members understand important drivers of business performance, they assess themselves almost solely by the rigor of their scientific research. This scientific model is predicated on the faulty assumption that business is an academic discipline like chemistry or geology when, in fact, business is a profession and business schools are professional schools--or should be. Business school deans may claim that their schools remain focused on practice, but they nevertheless hire and promote research-oriented professors who haven't spent time working in companies and are more comfortable teaching methodology than messy, multidisciplinary issues--the very stuff of management. The authors don't advocate a return to the days when business schools were glorified trade schools. But to regain relevancy, they say, business schools must rediscover the practice of business and find a way to balance the dual mission of educating practitioners and creating knowledge through research.
CATARACT: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE.
The earliest extant description of a surgical operation for the cure of cataract is that of Celsus, toho practiced medicine in Rome at the beginning of the Christian era. In his text De Meclicina he described in detail his method of couching, by which he inserted a bronze needle into the eye at the equator on the lateral side of ihe globe and depressed the cataract downward into the lower part of the vitreous where the surgeon hoped it would remain out of the way of vision. The same method had been employed by the Greeks and Hindus for at least several hundred years earlier and ivas to continue as the only operation available until the middle of the eighteenth century when Daviel of Paris described extraction of the lens through the cornea. The early couchers worked on the premise that the crystallin humor we know as the lens was the receptor for vision, and that in certain conditions of disease a suffusion flowed doivn in front of the crystallin humor where it solidified and formed a dense curtain. The purpose of couching was to press the hardened corrupt humor out of the way of the lens. That cataract was opaque material within the lens itself was not recognized until after the middle of ihe seventeenth century. Until then ihe surgeons were not even aware that it was the lens they were dislocating.