International News

B-schools reinventing themselves

"Toyota would have been proud of our just-in-time implementation," claims Joel Podolny, dean of the Yale School of Management — surely the first time the head of an academic institution has, without a hint of irony, used a factory-floor metaphor for speed and efficiency to describe his ivory tower. In March 2006 the faculty voted to change its MBA curriculum fundamentally. By September they were teaching it.

Instead of the well-worn method of teaching functional subjects, such as marketing, strategy, accounting and so forth, students who are now completing their first year at Yale are taught eight courses that address different themes, such as the customer, the employee, the investor, competitors, business and society, and innovation.

Yale has gone further than any Ivy League business school in shaking up its curriculum, but it is not alone in making changes. Stanford’s Graduate School of Business which many reckon is second only to Harvard Business School (HBS) among the elite global schools, will introduce sweeping changes in September this year. Indeed most of the leading American business schools, including HBS, have upgraded their courses by some level since 2002. That was the year when the business of business education looked to be heading for trouble.

Five years ago, business schools, particularly in America, came under attack from all sides. Fairly or not, they received flak for the corporate scandals that erupted in firms such as Enron and WorldCom. Jeffrey Skilling, the former boss of Enron, was a star of the HBS class of 1979. Other corporate villains and their lackeys have boasted MBAs. Many agreed with one commentator that the only way to solve the ethical problems of corporate America was to fire everyone under 35 with an MBA.

Such criticisms unleashed a flood of concern, much of which had been building up for years. The value of the schools’ main product, the MBA was in doubt. It became fashionable to argue that the most useful thing a business school, particularly a top one, does for its students was to confer on them its stamp of approval by letting them in. Anything they might learn while they are there was a bonus.

As if to prove it, business school customers seemed to vote with their feet and applications for MBA courses began to dip. Graduating MBAs also experienced great difficulty in finding work — which after all was the main purpose of going to business school. Tuck Business School, for instance was typical in reporting that only 90 percent of the class of 2003 had received a job offer within three months of graduating, a much smaller share than usual.

Today the mood in business schools is a lot happier, and not just in America but also in other countries, which now boast more business schools and many more MBAs than ever before. Applications have recovered strongly and the salaries offered to business school graduates are rising again.

Unending academic agony

Karem al-Zubaidi does not want to claim benefits from Britain or to class himself as an asylum seeker. "I have been working for 22 years," says the clinical bio-chemistry professor. "I hate to sit here doing nothing." When he fled Iraq and his job at the University of Baghdad in October 2004, al-Zubaidi was offered an honorary post at Bangor University.

He obtained a work permit under the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme (HSMP), but this needed to be validated by leaving the UK and returning, having gained entry clearance. However, the UK has declared the ‘S series’ passports, issued to the first wave of fleeing Iraqis invalid. As the professor holds an S series passport, he would be unable to return to the UK should he leave, so he cannot validate his HSMP permit. "It seems I have no choice but to claim asylum," he says and as asylum seekers are forbidden to work, he cannot take the job Bangor University is offering him.

The fiasco is the last in a series of blows to the professor. His troubles began with the invasion of Iraq by US and British troops more than four years ago. He recalls his return to work at the end of the war, in May 2003. "The university had been looted. My office had been stripped of air conditioning, the desks had gone, the refrigerator had disappeared…"

Outside a gang of Iraqis was attacking the registration officer. "They were beating him; he was covered in blood, he was dying in front of his students and colleagues. Somehow one of them managed to step in and save him. When I saw this incident I knew that life was going to be terrible," recalls al-Zubaidi. The registration officer, like most of Iraq’s minor officials and civil servants was a member of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party before the war. Prof. al-Zubaidi was not a Baathist, but was on the district council — and he is a Sunni Muslim.

Al-Zubaidi put up with the situation for a year, but in the end it was too much. The family left the country for Britain on multiple visit visas. One of the professor’s three daughters is a British citizen, as she was born when he and his wife were studying in the UK. "At my interview with the Home Office they said my daughter should apply for asylum. I told them she had a British passport, but they have added her name to the form anyway," he says.

The professor does not see himself as one of the lucky ones, but he is faring better than his colleagues left behind in Iraq. Last November, gunmen seized dozens of academics working at the Iraq ministry of higher education’s scientific research directorate. The mass kidnap signalled an escalation in violence towards higher education professionals and students. It was followed in January by a bomb attack outside the University of Baghdad.

The anti-war Brussels Tribunal Campaign holds a list of 311 academics murdered since the invasion. Among hundreds of Iraqis killed in April 2007 was Subhi Farhan al-Janabi, secretary general of the Iraqi Society of Gastroenterology and Hepatology. The society’s president Makki Fayadh said: "An armed gang was waiting for him outside his clinic. They gunned him down and left. Dr. al-Janabi had stayed in Iraq to serve his patients, train our doctors and look after our society. He was a big-hearted man." Such are the trials and tribulations of brave academics still struggling to teach in Iraq.

Right diagnosis wrong remedy

The British school system produces some world-class high-flyers, mainly in its private schools and the 164 selective state ‘grammar’ schools that survived the cull in the 1960s and 1970s when the country moved to a non-selective system. But it serves neither its poor children nor its most troublesome ones well. The best state schools, especially the grammar schools, are colonised by the middle classes, and the whole system is disfigured by a long straggling tail of non-achievers.

Last month David Willetts, the Conservative education spokesman, set out what the Tories would do to rectify these failings. He said a lot of sensible things about freeing up the supply side in education and opening lots more independent state schools in poor areas. But the headlines came from his announcement that when the Tories come to power, they would open no more of their cherished grammar schools: in his view, they are no longer a ladder for the poor but bright.

In political terms, the move seemed an odd mixture of bravery (reacting to statistical evidence, caring about social mobility) and cynicism (despite new thinking that selection is a bad idea, the Tories will keep the existing grammar schools and their middle class votes). Either way, it was a mistake: selection — and yes, even elitism — are useful.

The new concern, rightly raised by the Tories, is that grammar schools no longer help enough clever poor children. Willetts worries about meritocracy. Here his diagnosis seems right but his remedy wrong. With richer parents coaching their children furiously, the few grammar schools that remain are largely middle-class enclaves: only 2 percent of their students are entitled to free school meals, compared with 12 percent in their local areas. This is indeed a shocking figure. But it is surely an argument for better early teaching for poor children or building more selective secondary schools, not an argument to abandon even that 2 percent by banning academic selection.

Social mobility is a good thing, and the Tories are right to want to foster it. But so is an elite. After all, there’s not much point in moving upwards if there’s nowhere to go.

Slow rehab of Confucius

"Study the past", Confucius said, "if you would define the future." Now he himself has become the object of that study. Confucius was revered — indeed worshipped — in China for more than 2,000 years. But neither the Communist Party, nor the 20th century itself, has been kind to the sage. Modern China saw the end of the imperial civil-service examinations he inspired, the end of the imperial regime itself and the repudiation of the classical Chinese in which he wrote. Harsher still, during the Cultural Revolution Confucius and his followers were derided and humiliated by Mao Zedong in his zeal to build a "new China".

Now Prof. Kang Xiaoguang, an outspoken scholar at Beijing’s Renmin University, argues that Confucianism should become China’s state religion. Such proposals bring Confucius’ rehabilitation into the open. It is another sign of the struggle within China for an alternative ideological underpinning to Communist Party rule in a country where enthusiasm for communism waned long ago and where, officials and social critics fret, anything goes if money is to be made.

Confucius’ rehabilitation has been slow. Explicit attacks on him ended as long ago as 1976, when Mao died, but it is only now that his popularity has really started rising. On topics ranging from political philosophy to personal ethics, old Confucian ideas are gaining new currency.

With a recent book and television series on the Analects, the best-known collection of the sage’s musings, author Yu Dan has tried to make his teachings accessible to ordinary Chinese. Scholars have accused her of oversimplifying, but her treatment has clearly struck a chord: her book has sold nearly 4 million copies, an enormous number even in China.

Further interest is evinced by the Confucian study programmes springing up all over the Chinese education system. These include kindergarten classes in which children recite the classics, Confucian programmes in philosophy departments at universities, and even Confucian-themed executive education programmes offering sage guidance for business people.

But perhaps the most intriguing — albeit ambivalent — adopter of Confucianism is the Communist Party itself. Since becoming China’s top leader in 2002, President Hu Jintao has promoted a succession of official slogans, including "harmonious society" and "xiaokang shehui" ("a moderately well off society"), which have Confucian undertones. On the other hand, says one scholar at the party’s top think-tank, the Central Party School, official approval is tempered by suspicions about religion and by lingering concern over the mixture of Buddhism and other religious elements in Confucian thinking.

The relevance of Confucian ideas to modern China is obvious. Confucianism emphasises order, balance and harmony. It teaches respect for authority and concern for others. Yet despite this, Confucianism is not an easy fit for the party. It says those at the top must prove their worthiness to rule. This means Confucianism does not really address one of the government’s main worries, that while all will be well so long as China continues to prosper, the party has little to fall back upon if growth falters.

Writing last year, Prof. Kang argued that a marriage of Confucianism and communism could nevertheless be made to work. He argued that the party has in reality allied itself with China’s urban elite. "It is", he wrote, "an alliance whereby the elites collude to pillage the masses," leading to "political corruption; social inequality, financial risks, rampant evil forces and moral degeneration." The solution, he argued was to "Confucianise the Chinese Communist Party at the top and society at the lower level."

Government-academia confrontation

According to the number of citations in leading scientific journals, Israel (pop. 7 million) ranks fourth in international tables of scientific publications per capita (the UK is number six). A survey based on the number of citations in leading scientific journals also ranks Israeli research as fourth best in the world. But Israeli academia is living on borrowed time, says Ilam Gur-Ze’ev professor of education at Haifa University. The rankings reflect the achievements of researchers trained in a bygone era who owe their success to investment that no longer exists and who try to operate in a system being dismantled around them. In short he argues that they succeeded despite, not because of the current infrastructure. And he predicts that standards will slip substantially in the next couple of decades.

While once academia and state-building went hand in hand, the governing authorities in the Jewish state are increasingly viewed as the enemies of the academies. The state has cut budgets for research and ongoing operations by more than £150 million (Rs.1,213.5 crore) in the past decade, leaving the country’s annual higher education budget at £650 million (Rs.5,250 crore), roughly equivalent to the running costs of one large US university. It ushered in reforms dubbed "commercialisations", which critics such as Gur-Ze’ev say distort the legacy of "the people of the book" into that of "the people of the book-keeper".

The resulting situation is somewhat ironic. Each of the country’s seven universities was founded as an intellectual powerhouse where Jewish immigrants from around the world would create a meeting of minds. Zionism’s aim, the "ingathering of the exiles" — which was taken straight from the Bible — was meant to reach its pinnacle there. But today there is an exodus from Israeli academia to universities in the UK, the US and even Eastern Europe.

Research suggests that the brain drain is gathering pace quickly, with the percentage of academics leaving Israel almost doubling every two years. In 2002, 0.9 percent of academics left; by 2004 it was 1.7 percent.

The current battle lines between the parliament and academe were drawn in 2000 when after three years of deliberation, a government committee waged war on traditional elements of university life, including elected deans and an autonomous senate. These features of the university contribute to "the creation of inertia without a real attempt at reform," the committee said.

The backlash from academics was swift. Led by Prof. Gur Ze’ev they founded the Inter-Senate Committee of the Universities for the Protection of Academic Independence. It concluded that the government committee "ignored the decisive contribution of the universities to the national economy and security. It ignored the fact that through higher education we have turned from an agricultural to an industrial state with high technology and increased tenfold the GNP".

Seven years later, the reforms are still being implemented and opponents are still trying to block them. Since the process began, student numbers have increased by between 30-50 percent. But just as the reforms were beginning to bite, so was the second intifada, which started in September 2000. This intensified spending on defence, which has long been blamed for diverting funds from academia.

Pro Bono tradition under fire

Next time you feel underpaid, spare a thought for 32,000 Argentine academics who work for nothing. In common with other countries in the developing world, it is a tradition for many university teachers in Argentina to work for free or to do pro bono work in addition to their normal teaching duties.

Argentinians use the Latin phrase ad honorem meaning "out of honour" to describe teachers who work in this way, but it is a term that serves only to rile trade unionists campaigning to end the system and see that all academics are paid for their work. "There is no honour in institutions that oblige their workers to do work ‘out of honour’," says Horacio Fernandez, assistant secretary of the trade union Association de Docentes de la Universidad de Buenos Aires (Aduba).

The vast majority of the 32 state universities in Argentina have teachers who work pro bono. The exact number of academics working in this way is a bone of contention between the trade unions and the government because of lax record-keeping by the universities. But according to Aduba, the total is about 32,000 of which the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) has by far the most: some 20,000 teachers who work pro bono, of whom some 9,400 are attached to the university’s school of medicine. According to the government however, there are only 10,000 academics in the whole country who work pro bono.

"UBA is in a state of chaos," says Alberto Dibbern minister for university policy. "There are no formal contracts for academics who work pro bono. They are given an appointment, but this does not specify a period of time, so perhaps many academics who once worked pro bono no longer do so. They may be included on some lists and not on others."

But the practice of working pro bono has always been part of the Argentine university system. However it has grown since the 1990s as total student numbers have increased to 1.3 million. Eduardo Rieiro, who teaches administrative law on pro bono basis at UBA’s faculty of law says: "The great majority of academics in this faculty begin in this way. Roughly speaking, you have to do four years of non-paid teaching before you can secure a salaried position. In this faculty, which is very prestigious, the salaried positions are highly sought-after. For us, it’s a vocation, and it’s useful to have contact with the students." In common with the vast majority of academics who work pro bono in the law faculty (some 3,000 according to Aduba) Rieiro also practises as a lawyer.

(Excerpted and adapted from Times Educational Supplement, Times Higher Education Supplement and The Economist)