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.
Presidential Address: 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.
School Principals and Education Law: What do they know, what do they need to know?
Principals now work in complex and challenging environments where uncertainty and change are the hallmarks of their roles and responsibilities. As such, the knowledge and capability demands on principals have expanded, including those related to education law. While these matters attracted some research interest a number of years ago, there has been little recent work in the area of principals and education law. This article reports on an exploratory study into aspects of the legal knowledge held by Tasmanian government school principals, particularly concerning non-sexual physical contact between teachers and students. The research was undertaken using a small-scale, mixed-methods research design, which required principals to respond to various legal scenarios. Three key findings emerged from the study. First, principals used two different levels of working knowledge about education law  one related to legal problems, and the other to legally-related routine activities. Second, on the particular topic of physical contact, some knowledge held by principals was not legally accurate. Third, for major legal issues, participants indicated that they acquired access to information from legal experts. The situation for routine legal matters was less clear, although in-service training and practical experience were identified as potential sources of knowledge. Participants recognised the importance of a sound knowledge of education law, especially for dealing with security and safety issues and preferred to access further information through in-service training. Notably, the findings of the study are broadly consistent with those from earlier Australian and international research, suggesting that much remains to be done in the area of principals’ education law knowledge.