A Simple Fix For the M.B.A.
By Peter Augustine Lawler
Employers tend to complain that the graduates of American
universities are skilled in solving particular problems but "often miss
the big picture." This complaint rings true for colleges graduates in
general these days, but it's an even larger issue for M.B.A. students, who hope
to ultimately ascend to leadership positions in a wide array of businesses.
Accordingly, the Wall Street Journal reported last week, M.B.A. programs are
beginning to introduce philosophy into their curricula.
One example: A course
in "Nobel Thinking," which exposes students to world-changing ideas
generated by members of our cognitive elite.
The course is taught by a professor of economics and discusses
transformative economic ideas like "adverse selection." It seems,
however, that only an economist could think that an insight into "what
happens when buyers and sellers have access to different information"
changed the world. Nobel-winning
economists do, in fact, have big-picture abstract thoughts. But they shouldn't be confused with the
thoughts of political or corporate leaders.
Adam Smith and Karl Marx--less technical than political economists--did
have thoughts that changed the world.
But they didn't win Nobel Prizes and so don't show up in the course.
A liberally educated person thinks here of Socrates's
criticism of the sophists, who thought of all education as technical, as ways
of acquiring wealth and power. Socrates
argues that no one in a real position of leadership can succeed if he or she thinks
that low. The "utility
maximizer" of the sophists and today's economists is really an
abstraction. There's no real person who
consistently thinks and acts that way.
Real persons are families, friends, citizens, creatures, and responsible
leaders, in addition to being productive individuals.
So the Socratic injunction to know yourself is really about
thinking less abstractly and more concretely or personally. One management professor, seemingly in this
spirit, gave her students "a nonstop, 14-day discovery of
yourself." The take-away for the
students, however, was the irreducible variety of interpretations and
"palpable anxiety" in the face of ambiguity. They appeared not to have made the progress
described by Plato in Socratic dialogues toward discovering "who I am and
what I'm supposed to do." Without
such personal progress, the best way to take out the anxiety of ambiguity is to
lose oneself in merely technical goals.
It may well take more than 14 days to discover oneself. And a whirlwind tour of art, fiction, and
meditation can't make up for deep deficiencies in one's upbringing and
education. That tour seems to leave the impression that we're all detached
tourists in a multicultural world that offers no solid moral or intellectual
guidance.
Big ideas and self-knowledge can't really be effective
add-ons to M.B.A. programs. But who can
deny that leaders who hope to be more than "specialists without
spirit" need them?
There's an obvious solution. M.B.A. programs should only
accept students who have flourished in excellent and relatively traditional
"humanities" majors such as literature, philosophy, or political
science. They should not require that
their students have taken any business courses at all. That technical training is what the M.B.A. is
for.
Not only that, M.B.A. programs should do what they can to
encourage undergraduate programs to focus on "the leadership virtues"
such as generosity, magnanimity, and prudence, as well as "the service
virtues" such as charity and compassion. There is, of course, no substitute for
actually doing the leisurely reading in philosophical, religious, and literary
masterpieces required to pick up the habits of genuine reflection.
The last presidential campaign was graced by two candidates
who spoke eloquently and had an admirable sense of personal responsibility of a
leader. Mitt Romney had an undergraduate
literature major, which was an indispensable prelude to his acquisition of the
professional M.B.A. and law degrees.
Barack Obama had excellent undergraduate instruction in political
philosophy and literature (he knows all about T.S. Eliot!) at Occidental and
Columbia as an indispensable prelude to his law degree.
Undergraduate business degrees devote too much time to
PowerPoint presentations, collaborative projects, and narrowly technical
problem solving. They seem to do everything they can to divert the student from
thinking about himself or herself as a particular person. They're not about cultivating the souls of
leaders. And that lack of cultivation,
it's pretty darn clear, can't be remedied "at the M.B.A. level."
There's a simple remedy for the struggle M.B.A. programs
have in getting students to think big yet personally and beyond "the
bottom line": a rather
old-fashioned undergraduate liberal arts education. And recovering the proper relationship
between liberal and technical education for emerging leaders is one way among
many of thinking clearly again about what undergraduate education is for.
_____________________________
Peter Lawler is Dana Professor of Government and
International Studies at Berry College.
