"A belief in business schools as a force for good in the world"

Inside Higher Ed: Wharton Dean:

The University of Pennsylvania announced the selection of Thomas S. Robertson as dean of the Wharton School — a position that will give him unusual prominence in the world of business education. Robertson, 64, is the former dean of Emory University’s Goizueta Business School and director of Emory’s Institute for Developing Nations. He was on Wharton’s marketing faculty from 1971 to 1994. Penn’s president, Amy Gutmann said Robertson “brings great leadership experience and great knowledge to the school,” as well as an interest in international outreach, experience building interdisciplinary programs and “a belief in business schools as a force for good in the world. Robertson said that though he has certain ideas he’d like to put in place as dean — including programs on developing nations and increased collaboration with Penn’s 11 other schools, initiatives in which Gutmann also voiced interest, “ultimately, your job as dean is hiring and keeping faculty and attracting the best students possible.”

Harvard Course Yields Education Entrepreneurs

Education Week:

When Stacey M. Childress began teaching a course on educational entrepreneurship at the Harvard Business School three years ago, she anticipated that a few graduates each year would make the leap into the education sector. But, to her surprise, the course has proved to be a breeding ground for the next generation of educational risk-takers.

Recent graduates have gone on to found their own charter schools; work for the Broad and Bill & Melinda Gates foundations; help manage district redesigns in New York City and Oakland, Calif.; join Teach For America, the KIPP charter school network, and the Harlem Children’s Zone; and enter the education practices of mainstream consulting companies, among other ventures....

And while some of those students enrolled in the course knowing that they wanted to enter the education field, for others it was a turning point. ...

“This isn’t an education course that happens to be at the business school,” said Ms. Childress, whose first job was teaching English at a public high school in Texas before she went to work in the electronics-security industry and, subsequently, co-founded a software company. “It’s an entrepreneurship course that happens to be focused on the education sector.

“It sits within our social-enterprise course offerings that are about starting, leading, and managing mission-driven organizations,” she said, “and it’s cross-listed with our entrepreneurship unit.” ...

But what sets the Harvard course apart, according to Kim Smith, a co-founder of the San Francisco-based NewSchools Venture Fund, a venture philanthropy working in education, is its focus on entrepreneurship as a way to think about redesigning the education system, “and really improving the system, not just starting a company for its own sake.”...

It’s framed around two central questions: Is there a link between effective leadership and management practices and higher educational outcomes? And, will the introduction of market principles—such as the transparency of performance data, accountability for results, and choices for customers—force change on the public system and lead to higher performance?

Was Earning That Harvard M.B.A. Worth It?

From The New York Times:

''M.B.A. programs train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences,'' said Henry Mintzberg, a management professor at McGill University in Montreal. ''You can't create a manager in a classroom. If you give people who aren't managers the impression that you turned them into one, you've created hubris.''

In 2003, Professor Mintzberg tracked the performance of 19 students who graduated from the Harvard Business School in 1990 and were at the top of their class academically. Ten of the 19 were ''utter failures,'' he said. ''Another four were very questionable, at least,'' he added. ''So five out of 19 did well.''

Cheating Across Cultures

- From Inside Higher Ed :

...the complaints serve to spotlight some of the particular challenges inherent in addressing issues of academic integrity involving international students, many of whom come to American colleges with different conceptions of cheating. As the number of international students has increased in recent years — and the number of academic misconduct incidents involving international students has risen accordingly — educators have increasingly embraced the need to address academic integrity concerns proactively, recognizing in their actions the various cultural influences that can help cause one to cheat.

Most of the concerns surrounding international students and cheating center around plagiarism, a form of cheating that’s all too common among American undergraduates, some of whom say they were never taught what was legitimate and what wasn’t. But while international students certainly are far from alone in cheating, their circumstances are often unique, and international student advisors and experts cite a whole host of specific reasons why international students might knowingly or unknowingly circumvent the system.

Foremost among them is that the Western style of citing sources isn’t universal: Greenblatt points out that many Asian students, for instance, come from educational systems in which the norm is to repeat back a textbook or a professor verbatim (without a citation), as a sign of respect to the source of knowledge. In collectivist cultures, adds Petra Crosby, director of international student programs and a lecturer in the cross-cultural studies concentration at Carleton College, knowledge is often viewed as a shared endeavor, so “copying” doesn’t always encapsulate the same connotation. Not to mention that knowledge itself can be defined differently, at least as far as what’s common and doesn’t need to be cited: What’s common knowledge in Indiana can, after all, be substantially different than what’s common knowledge in India....

Cheating in professional schools

From Inside Higher Ed :: Cheating on a Different Level:

On Friday, the Faculty Council at Indiana’s dental school voted to dismiss 9 of its students, suspend 16 for various lengths of time and send a letter of reprimand to 21 others for violating its professional code of conduct by knowing about and not reporting the incident. The class has just under 100 students.

Two professional conduct committees — one comprising students and the other faculty — looked into the cheating allegations and the entire faculty had a say in the final decision.

“This has been a wrenching experience for everyone involved — for students who made this big error and classmates, faculty, administrators and alumni,” Goldblatt said. “It’s sad that this happened and it’s sad that we had to take this action.”

The school has an obligation to take cases of cheating seriously because it certifies that graduates “can be trusted to do the absolute right thing in every situation in their professional lives, even when nobody is looking,” he added.

The article is accompanied by some strongly-felt comments and pretty distressing statistics.