I hope Bloom wasn't suggesting MDs should be reserved as a mark of "scholarly acheivement." Last Thursday, an orthopaedic surgeon set the bones in my sons broken arm and did a mighty fine job. I couldn't care less if the good Dr. never published in a peer reviewed journal. Also, I once took an undergraduated commerce course that opened my eyes to the unspoken class bias in the canons of sociology, anthropology and political science. It all became much clearer. As for the MBA boom itself, it was the academic/intellectual equivalent of Enron or WorldCom -- the bottom line looked impressive because the thing was specifically designed to create that appearance. There is, of course, no academic equivalent of the S.E.C. to pursue intellectual fraud.
"Here's a writer I don't often quote with approval: ".a great disaster has occurred. It is the establishment during the last decade or so of the MBA as the moral equivalent of the MD or the law degree, meaning a way of insuring a lucrative living by the mere fact of a diploma that is not the mark of scholarly achievement.the prebusiness economics major, who not only does not take an interest in sociology, anthropology or political science but is also persuaded that what he is learning can handle all that belongs to those studies. Moreover, he is not motivated by the love of the science of economics but by love of what it is concerned with-money." "This is from Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which shot up the bestseller list in the 1980s. Bloom goes on to say that prospective MBA students have "blinders" put on them. Now, why is it that all of Bloom's paranoid passages about the effects of 60s radicals and shallow multiculturalism on the university are quoted by William Bennett yet not the passage above? "Bloom was right about the MBA student. Anyone who attended an American university in the 80s or 90s can remember those smug fellows who dreamed of the riches derived from a Wharton or Harvard MBA. (The role model was Donald Trump with his degree from the Wharton School of Finance.) Who can forget their superior attitude toward their fellow students who were wasting their time in the humanities department? "By the way, George W. Bush is the first president with an MBA." Tom Walker 604 255 4812
