Chat Transcript May 26, 2009, 2:28PM EST

The Future of Business School

(page 5 of 5)

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But at their root, what makes these institutions come alive is an ultimate purpose. What is the purpose of business education? Is it to make money or is it to make the world a better place to live? These are two separate things. They are often congruent, but sometimes they are not. They are not congruent when the lion's share of the economic benefits go to a small number of people and the lion's share of costs are borne by those who had little to do with creating our current problems. These are also not incongruent when an institution is willing to sacrifice its public purpose mission for short-term expediency. We have seen consequences of this. I want my students to be employable. But there is much more to an education. Education is about training the whole person. Business education can and should be a transformative experience.

Rufus: What role does the student culture of the business school play in building ethical MBA graduates?

RakeshKhurana: As far as student culture, I think there has been sometimes hesitancy among many students to go against the grain of the "unbridled" capitalism model publicly in class. Students need to challenge each other and challenge their faculty when they find these issues discussed in an uncritical way.

Moreover, ethics issues should not be isolated in an ethics class. Push your faculty (finance, organizational behavior, accounting) to discuss the ethical implications of some of the tools they are teaching and the cases that have ethical implications. I think this will begin changing the culture.

FredCollopy: Which schools are most likely to take the lead in real reform?

RakeshKhurana: I think there are a number of schools that will look at reform. The research we are doing [at Harvard] as part of our Centennial review of business education finds that a number of very distinctive, new ideas are being tried out in the smaller, less-visible programs. In the larger, more well-known programs, there are innovations related to social enterprise being tried out as well as more reflection around leadership. I am not sure where all of this will land and what will get institutionalized, though. My biggest worry is that these changes will not affect the core operating system. I think we need to approach business school change in a systems way, not simply in a laundry list way. We need to look at the totality of the system of employers, students, faculty, curriculum, faculty-promotion criteria, rankings as a whole and think about how we get system change if we want profound improvement.