Posts tagged with business.

DeGroote business school dean is resigning

Joey Coleman, December 17, 2010 at 3:06 PM

The boxing match between the dean of McMaster's DeGroote School of Business and the academic faculty within it is over - the academic faculty have won a TKO.

The dean, former Charles Schwab executive Paul Bates, is resigning from his position following the release of a report by a three-person panel that "clearly concluded" that it is "essential for a change in leadership in the School."

The panel was created early this year following a report by the university's Office of Human Rights and Equity Services which found the faculty had "become a dysfunctional work environment" due to infighting about Bates, who, as a non-academic, was not accepted by many of the tenured academics in the faculty.

Bates was appointed dean in 2004 to bring the DeGroote School closer to the business world and address concerns that its competitive position relative to other business schools was hampered by a lack of industry-experienced faculty within the school.

Bates was a controversial choice as dean, as he does not hold an undergraduate degree and had no experience leading in academia.

He was very successful at improving the profile of the Business School, securing donations for an expansion of programs - including the building of a new MBA and graduate programs campus in Burlington, Ont., - and is widely popular with students at the school.

Over the years, I've interviewed Bates numerous times and have enjoyed many conversations with him regarding the direction of business education within the academy. He knowledge is second to none and I'm of the opinion that he is one of the best business-oriented Deans in the country.

It is a tribute to his character that he's stepping aside in light of this report but not leaving the school. He's moving to the Burlington campus and will take a leadership role focused "on strategy and development" as the satellite campus is being established.

With Bates gone, the faculty who poisoned the business school have won the victory they seek, but not without tremendous collateral damage to the institution.

McMaster faces the dual challenge of taming their emboldened professors at the same time as trying to find a new dean to run the school, with the knowledge that the university can no longer move in the direction of being more industry oriented.

The university will not find the best candidate for the position - those individuals will be wise enough to await an opening at another business school - someone who can juggle the infighting, quell concerns on Bay Street about sending their executives to DeGroote programs, and prevent a split between the campuses.

It's a tall order and I don't see how anyone will be able to prevent the school from splitting into two distinct entities - the undergraduate programs in Hamilton and the graduate ones in Burlington.

The one advantage they have is that the panel's report offers a road map for restructuring the school. At 36 pages, it's well worth reading for anyone following the continuing debate about the relevance of business schools within the university setting.

I wonder how many case studies will be written warning other business executives of the mistakes made by McMaster University after hiring Bates. One thing's for sure: They'll require more than 36 pages.

Tagged with mcmaster, business, dean, bates, resigning, degroote, paul | Comments (16) |

Business schools shouldn’t stand on their own

Joey Coleman, February 8, 2010 at 4:18 PM

 

Colin Mayer, Peter Moores Dean at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, argues in an opinion piece published last year  that "business schools are on the cusp of a new dawn which will see their significance and size expand to greater heights." 

He's right, but not for the reasons stated in his opinion.

Noting that, since "their inception more than 100 years ago, the death of business schools and MBAs has been predicted to be imminent," Dr. Mayer believes business schools are finally finding their place within the academy. He openly discusses the dirty secret about how business schools are perceived by business as being too academic and by academia as not being academic at all. In short, they have an identity crisis.

Dr. Mayer correctly observes that in their rush to become relevant to business, which often reimburses or subsidizes the high tuition fees of profitable MBA programs, business schools have forgotten the academic nature of being part of the academy. "Business education is not or should not fundamentally be about 'how to' manage a business. It is as much about 'why' and 'what'," Dr. Mayer writes.

Business schools need to be "more in line with what universities traditionally teach," he proclaims.

Up until this point, he is making a good argument about what a business education should be - more academic than practical training - but doesn't yet explain why business schools belong within the university.

He uses the management degree as his example degree program. Management skills require "a fundamental understanding of the science, medicine, politics and law," Dr. Mayer writes. He notes that businesses cannot teach these fundamental skills on their own as those in business do not have the specialization to understand these skills as well as those immersed within the academy.

Management, in other words, is a skill that requires wide-ranging knowledge gathered from several disciplines. But here is where we differ: Nothing in his argument justifies the existence of business schools as standalone faculties with their own faculty and dean.

Business is nothing more than a glorified social science. It is a department masquerading as a faculty.

Most subjects taught in business schools could be better taught by academics housed within the departments of their discipline - merely with a specialization of how the discipline relates to the business world. There is nothing academic (learning to be an accountant is not academic, it is practical and belongs in colleges) taught by business schools that could not be housed within the existing disciplines of social science.

The Saïd Business School dean is correct that business schools are going to continue "to expand to greater heights." Not because they are actually becoming truly academic - they are not. They will expand only because they are profitable units within the money-hungry modern university.

More on this topic: The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting piece about the push to increase the liberal arts content of the undergraduate business degree. 

Tagged with school, separate, business, faculty | Comments (21) |