Like most of us, I was delighted by Marianne's article in the Wall Street
Journal.  Like many of you, I have distributed copies of it to my department
and my dean.
 
At the same time, I have a nagging, minor discomfort with the article that I
would like to voice.  While lampooning and harpooning the chart & graph
mentality of many of our colleagues, the article seems to criticize them
mainly because what they teach is not directly applicable to business.  They
are not relevant.  But this implies that relevance ought to be the standard by
which business school curricula are measured.
 
But I'm not sure about that.  Marianne mentions the puzzlement of business
school faculty when businesses hire liberal arts majors.  One thing's for sure:
They're not hiring liberal arts majors because of any "relevance" or direct
practical applicability in the liberal arts curriculum.  Indeed, the liberal
arts
curriculum prides itself on *not* being relevant or directly applicable.  If I
may quote from a recent article in Bostonian magazine:
 
        "These days, being ready for a particular job at twenty-two may be a
        certain way of finding oneself unmarketable at forty-two.  And despite
        calls for more engineers, managers, and other specialists to fill
        immediate national needs, the utility test is equally invalid for our
        democracy itself, which in the long run depends on perspective and
        values developed by a strong liberal arts curriclum."
 
I would speculate that businesses hire liberal arts majors not for their
particular knowledge of anything relevant to business (minimal), but for their
ability to think, imagine, express and analyze (considerable).  The ideal
business curriculum would do all that too, while also teaching the student a
thing or two about the world of business.
 
The reason I'm making this point is because I teach at an institution on the
opposite end of the scale from the situation Marianne describes.  There aren't
any equation-writers here.  Everybody (except me) thinks that relevance is
everything.  The administration tells us that our success is measured by what
percentage of our students get jobs, and how fast they are promoted.   The
notion that the student is our "customer" is a commonplace here.  Scholarship
is seen as largely irrelevant (a distraction from attending admissions events
and trying to get our students jobs), and so there is practically no call for
it in
promotion or merit.  Consequently, nobody (again, except me) does any
scholarship.  One of my colleagues in marketing recently went to a
conference, and came back disgusted because the papers she saw weren't
about how to teach a better classroom.  Dare I suggest that this institution is
not serving the best interests of our students?
 
I would suggest that in addition to relevance, business curricula need a strong
dose of the humanities:  an understanding of humanity's place in the universe,
of business's place in culture, and of the student's place in history.
 
As I say, I actually liked the WSJ article quite a bit.  All I'm saying is
that it
is possible to O.D. on relevance and direct applicability.  (I realize that the
article is not calling for relevance as the sole criterion of the curriclum:
given that we are so far from relevance, a moderating towards relevance is
probably healthy.)
 
 
--Ken Schneyer
 
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