Crisis Hits the Business Schools

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While long-term curriculum shifts may take a few years, students can expect to encounter new classes, new case studies, and a new emphasis on risk. Much of this has already begun, with a growing number of business schools planning to add concentrations in risk management in coming years, ramping up the number of classes they offer and starting new risk management centers. Wharton's Meyer, also a professor at the University of Miami School of Business, is setting up such a center there this fall and predicts that others will soon follow suit.

At the same time, faculty are revising course descriptions and incorporating discussion of recent events in their classes. At Harvard Business School, professors Clayton Rose and Daniel Bergstresser are writing a case study examining JPMorgan Chase (JPM)'s hastily arranged takeover of Bear Stearns. They plan to teach the case to first-year students this spring in a class called "Leadership and Corporate Accountability." Rose says he is also working on two other case studies, one on Lehman and another examining investor Warren E. Buffett's $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs (GS). "There are many lessons in financial management and strategy that will come out of this last year and a half and will probably extend into the future," he says. "These are big policy issues, so there will be plenty to write about and reflect on." NYU is adding a class on the Great Depression. One theme: How reforms implemented in the wake of that crisis may have contributed to this one.

At Georgetown, James J. Angel, an associate professor of finance, has already introduced an elective this fall titled "The Changing Structure of Financial Markets: Financial Crises Past, Present and Future." The class was so popular that 95 students registered for the 65 available seats. "In many ways, I felt like a geologist teaching a class about earthquakes," says Angel, who tore up his syllabus several times as turmoil in the financial markets rewrote history. "When the big one hits, the first instinct is, 'Wow, that's cool,' and the second one, you say, 'Oh no.' "

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Damast is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.

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