Contact: Helen Paxton, Director of Communications, Rutgers Graduate
School of Management, 201/648-5177, [email protected]
The Foundation Reports On Business Schools: How Much Damage Did They Do?
The 1959 Ford and Carnegie reports on business schools caused severe and probably permanent damage to business education, forcing it into a narrow and overly-theoretical mold, says dr. Carter Daniel, of Rutgers Graduate School of Management, in his forthcoming book "MBA: The First Century."
It's been 37 years now since the famous "Foundation
Reports" slammed into business schools and made them the laughing
stock of the nation's intellectuals. For years it was impossible for the
schools to reply to the accusations without appearing to be self-serving
and defensive. Now, however, plenty of time has passed to permit an
impartial look at the whole episode.
What this look reveals is very clear: the foundation reports,
although well-intentioned, not only did no good but in fact caused such
serious harm that business schools are still suffering their effects
today.
To review briefly: In October 1959, both the Ford Foundation
and the Carnegie Corporation for the Advancement of Education issued
reports very critical of America's business schools. Five criticisms
dominated their attacks: (1) poor students, (2) untrained faculty, (3)
unintellectual curriculum, (4) lack of theoretical research, and (5)
unclear mission. Just about everybody jumped on the
let's-humiliate-the-business-schools bandwagon. The New York Times
said the reports "assailed" the schools; Business Week said they
"knocked the stuffing out of business schools"; and another observer
said they "sent the schools reeling in disgrace."
Baloney. Maybe that was the public's perception, but the
truth has turned out to be quite different.
First of all, the reports were based not on investigative
reporting, as they claimed, but on the schools' own self-studies. The
schools, under the guidance of the American Assembly of Collegiate
Schools of Business, had been working for years, with considerable
success, on ways of attracting better students and faculty and
enhancing the curriculum. The reports simply took these constructive
plans and made them into destructive headlines, as if they were great
discoveries. (Imagine the ill will!)
Second, the reports betrayed an utter ignorance of business
and business education. The authors, all traditional liberal-arts
academics, wanted "A" students, PhD-holding faculties, big libraries,
and lots of theoretical research, because those are the things that
qualify as "good" in traditional academic departments like history and
philosophy.
But it was already well known by then that successful
businesspeople seldom had been "A" students, that real-life
businesspeople know more about business than PhDs do, and that
hands-on experience produces far more of educational value than can
come from classroom instruction, books, or theoretical research. In fact
business schools in 1959 had been just about to strike a healthy
balance between theory and practice. But just then the reports came
along and yanked them entirely back into the theoretical camp,
considering anything "practical" to be unworthy of a university.
Third, the reports created two huge academic industries that
today are proving just about impossible to dismantle. By insisting that
professors of business had to have their PhDs specifically in business
rather than in other fields, the reports created the "business-PhD"
industry almost overnight. New schools sprang to life at an amazing
rate (one every 73 days!), and the number of graduates grew 827% in
just 15 years. Great scholars in economics and psychology -- not to
mention great practitioners in business -- could never qualify again to
teach in business schools, because they had been replaced by a new
narrowly-focused and classroom-bound generation.
Similarly, by calling for theoretical research the reports
created the subsequent explosion in academic writings about
business. Instead of answering questions that anybody in business
was asking (as one cynic observed recently), this research has
consisted almost entirely of building and tinkering with abstract models
that have almost never had an impact at all on the real business world.
On the subject of the schools' mission, the reports
questioned whether business should even be taught at all in four-year
colleges and thereby caused many schools to shut down their
undergraduate business programs entirely. The purpose was to make
students concentrate on traditional academic subjects, but it didn't
work. Market pressures soon prevailed, and undergraduate business
found ways of bursting back into the curriculum. The trouble was that,
when it did return, it had to do so by circumventing old regulations, and
therefore it escaped all the traditional controls (for example, the
requirement that everyone had to take 15 credits in the sciences).
Instead of strengthening the curriculum, the reports weakened it --
forever.
Finally, the reports diverted attention away from real
improvements in business education -- computers, new teaching
techniques, new philosophical approaches -- and made everyone sneer
without knowing what was really going on. Business schools were just
about to take giant steps forward, in both accomplishment and
reputation, when the reports came along and set them back for a whole
decade and more. We can recognize now that business is a different
kind of field that requires a different kind of education. No thanks to the
foundation reports, it's taken a lot longer than it should have to reach
this recognition.
Dr. Carter A. Daniel teaches Business Communication at Rutgers
Graduate School of Management. The ideas reported here are from one
chapter of his forthcoming book, MBA: The First Century, to be
published next year by Bucknell University Press.
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