First, Kill All the MBAs

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Nor were faculty members sounding as many warnings about Wall Street as they could have. “Our tendency was just to get excited by the novelty—and by our belief that markets could do no wrong,” says Jay Lorsch, a professor of human relations at Harvard Business School. Lorsch points out that most MBA programs have to maintain friendly ties with the corporate world. Professors often consult on the side and work closely with companies to develop case studies, while business schools depend on big firms to send students to their executive programs. “This all created a tendency to go along with the business community, to not be too critical,” Lorsch says.

These days, there is a genuine sense that something’s gone badly awry. At Wharton this spring, a new class on the financial crisis filled its 300 spots in less than 48 hours. Economic theories that would have been heretical 20 years ago—the idea, say, that people and markets don’t always behave rationally—are being greeted with fresh interest. At Harvard, informal debates are said to be breaking out in faculty lounges about whether professors should focus more on teaching students how to run businesses that are sustainable in the long term, rather than just pawning off the latest hedging techniques.

Still, the changes amount to something less than an outright revolution. When I asked current MBA students what sorts of things they weren’t hearing discussed in class, the list of still-too-delicate topics included whether executive pay schemes might have led people to take excessive risks, whether investment banks are really “value creating,” and, of course, what role MBAs might have played in the current crisis. Rakesh Khurana, a professor at Harvard Business School, told me that business schools still need to have a perhaps-uncomfortable discussion about their broader purpose in the world—a question that involves pondering “the fundamental relationship between the economy and society.” Not the sort of thing, alas, that’s easy to stick in a textbook.

Bradford Plumer is an assistant editor at the New Republic, a magazine that rigorously examines U.S. politics, foreign policy, and culture. This article was excerpted from the April 1, 2009, issue; www.tnr.com.

The New Republic is our 2009 Utne Independent Press Award winner for political coverage.

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