Business Schools: A Study in Failure

(page 2 of 2)

Peter Navarro

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One solution is to require new, tenure-track hires to take classes in the school's core curriculum. In this way, new hires would acquire some of the appropriate breadth for a functionally integrated approach in their own teaching.

A second suggestion is to digitize more completely the MBA toolbox. By using instructional CD-ROMs, "canned" video lectures, and interactive, Web-based exercises outside the classroom to deliver the functional silo pieces of their courses, instructors might be freed from the bonds of delivering basic chalk-and-talk principles. They can then use valuable class time to pursue more integrative, soft skill, and experiential themes.

A second obstacle to reform is high institutional barriers. Perversely, the higher a business school's ranking, the greater emphasis there is likely to be on research, and the less innovation there is likely to be in the classroom. The root cause is a promotion structure geared almost entirely toward research, rather than teaching innovation and quality.

One way to overcome such barriers is through a strong dean model, in which business school deans could more properly encourage the requisite reforms. A useful starting point would be to better reward time spent on curriculum development—a task often sacrificed on the "publish or perish" altar.

Another suggestion is to better provide incentives for sound pedagogy along the lines of the ideal curriculum. Here, organizations such as BusinessWeek that provide the critical rankings of business schools could help by grading each school on the integrative, experiential, globalization, social responsibility, and soft skill elements of its curriculum—and then heavily weight the curriculum grade in the ranking process.

Still a third suggestion is to reward pedagogical research. The problem here, as one journal article has put it, is that " research concerned with learning or pedagogy is, almost by definition, inferior work that must be relegated to second- or third-tier journals" while the same is true for "interdisciplinary work and research on international business."

The Role of the Association

Ultimately, the most direct path to reform is through a much more activist Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the leading accrediting organization. One of the most disappointing aspects of this decades-long reform debate has been the inability—or unwillingness—of the association to transform its own recommendations into concrete curriculum changes.

It is not that the AACSB lacks weapons—the accreditation process could be extremely effective in reshaping the curriculum landscape. To date, however, the AACSB has been reluctant to tightly link accreditation to implementing its own standards and the ideal curriculum. That, like the current state of MBA education, is a crying shame.

Peter Navarro is a business professor at the University of California at Irvine and author of The Coming China Wars and What the Best MBAs Know. His survey appears in the March, 2008, issue of the Academy of Management Learning & Education Journal. He can be reached at www.peternavarro.com.