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.
The Liverpool Cholera Epidemic of 1832 and Anatomical Dissection--Medical Mistrust and Civil Unrest
Asiatic cholera reached Britain for the first time in late 1831, with the main epidemic occurring during 1832. The disease caused profuse diarrhea, severe dehydration, collapse, and often death. There was widespread public fear, and the political and medical response to this new disease was variable and inadequate. In the summer of 1832, a series of "cholera riots" occurred in various towns and cities throughout Britain, frequently directed against the authorities, doctors, or both. The city of Liverpool, in the northwest of England, experienced more riots than elsewhere. Between 29 May and 10 June 1832, eight major street riots occurred, with several other minor disturbances. The object of the crowd's anger was the local medical fraternity. The public perception was that cholera victims were being removed to the hospital to be killed by doctors in order to use them for anatomical dissection. "Bring out the Burkers" was one cry of the Liverpool mobs, referring to the Burke and Hare scandal four years earlier, when two men had murdered people in Edinburgh in order to sell their bodies for dissection to the local anatomy school. This issue was of special concern to the Liverpool citizenry because in 1826, thirty-three bodies had been discovered on the Liverpool docks, about to be shipped to Scotland for dissection. Two years later a local surgeon, William Gill, was tried and found guilty of running an extensive local grave-robbing system to supply corpses for his dissection rooms. The widespread cholera rioting in Liverpool was thus as much related to local anatomical issues as it was to the national epidemic. The riots ended relatively abruptly, largely in response to an appeal by the Roman Catholic clergy read from church pulpits, and also published in the local press. In addition, a respected local doctor, James Collins, published a passionate appeal for calm. The Liverpool Cholera Riots of 1832 demonstrate the complex social responses to epidemic disease, as well as the fragile interface between the public and the medical profession.