Links for 11/30/10

Ben Schiller

management thinker Peter Drucker wrote that “no greater damage could be done to our economy or to our society than to attempt to ‘professionalize’ management by ‘licensing’ managers … or by limiting access to management to people with a special academic degree”. At the time, Drucker was worried by what he saw as a new phenomenon for managers to be trained at business schools, rather than ‘learning on the job’, as they always had...

Despite his reputation, society has completely failed to take Drucker’s advice...

Arguably, say its critics, management education does more to benefit universities and students (through fees and higher salaries) than it does the wider fabric...

In the old days, young people would join companies from university and spend years acquiring what the Hoopers call domain knowledge of their chosen industry. With business school, graduates were licensed to practice management, without ever having done it, and without in-depth industry understanding. This change, in turn, led to an over-reliance on financial metrics (to compensate for other knowledge), and the rise of financial engineering at the expense of lasting value creation...

The result was “intellectual arrogance and managerial incompetence on a scale inconceivable in earlier generations”...

The problem with business schools is they tend to produce more financial whiz kids and consultants, than innovators and entrepreneurs...

Though they teach some useful skills, business schools feed a culture of credentialism, where what matters is the degree, rather than skills or experience. They have created the illusion of a profession, and the pretense of a scientific body of knowledge. And they have done this largely not for our benefit, but for their own...

Ralph A. Rossum via Doug Lederman

I think every accreditor should be really nervous…

Dean Dad

The only way I can imagine the “Provost as Dr. Evil” theory making any sense would be if you never looked beyond the confines of a single academic department. If your context is any broader than that, the theory quickly falls apart…

Lanny Davis

On April 26, 2010, Steven Eisman, famed short-seller, met secretly with two senior DOE officials, Deputy Undersecretary of DOE Robert Shireman and Acting Deputy Assistant for Policy and Budget, David Bergeron. Less than two months later, the Department issued its first batch of regulations targeting only for-profit colleges -- and stocks in ten-out-of-fourteen public companies in the for-profit sector and, presumably, Mr. Shireman made lots of money.

The Department didn't disclose this Eisman meeting with such top officials -- only an enterprising reporter at Fortune dug it out and wrote about it last month. Nor has the Department stated it required Mr. Eisman to disclose his short positions before meeting with him.

Some weeks ago Ann Manheimer, DOE's Director of Work Force Development, who used to work for Mr. Shireman in the Undersecretary's office, met with well-known short-seller in the for-profits sector, Ansal Desai of Dallas, Texas. According to an email, Ms. Manheimer, supposed to be an objective public official writing a fair regulation, was asking the short-seller for anecdotes and examples of abuses in the for-profit, career-college sector only…

As a liberal Democrat, I worry that something is very wrong here. This is bad policy, bad politics and bad process…