What Makes an Executive M.B.A. Different

There is considerable controversy and conflict in America’s business schools concerning the best method to educate budding executives. There are the demands made by corporations and their CEOs who want MBA’s ready to jump into executive roles and make significant contributions. They see the B-school as a training ground and they donate large sums of money and send their executives to expensive executive programs where they expect schools to prepare them for leadership roles. The corporation has a direct investment in selected B-schools and they have turned them into voctech corporate training programs. CEOs do not want to establish their own training programs because they find it much easier to donate a few million to their favorite B-school, offer their faculty consulting gigs, sit on B-school boards, and send their executives to a customize training program. Plus B-school deans eagerly pursue these arrangements and offer CEO’s celebrity status on their campus. But there was a downside, in the process B-schools have sold their souls, given up academic choice and freedoms, and pushed serious scholars aside in favor of “how to do it” motivational speakers and celebrity professors. A serious conflict has evolved. There are deans, corporate leaders and professors who want to push forth the “corporate/practice model” of education and others who reject the voctech approach and believe the “theoretician/practioner or scholar/practioner model” of education is the correct way to educate MBA’s, and produce scholarly Ph.D.’s. Both sides of this conflict claim the other side is destroying business schools and some even claim the other side is responsible for corrupt and unethical CEO behavior. This battle is even split along ideological lines, with those pushing forth the “corporate/practice” model calling “theoretical/scholars” longhair leftists. In many B-schools open warfare between the two groups exists. At the McMasters DeGroote School of Business the president had to step in after an internal audit raised “grave concerns” describing vicious conflict that has split the school into two camps - those from an academic background and those from a business background. The academics want the Dean Paul Bates out and the corporate faculties want him to stay. Bates has no university degree and comes to the school after 20 years in the stock brokerage business; he joined after losing his job at Charles Schwab. Bates reappointment was opposed by 80 percent of the faculty but they were overruled by the board. According to Hemsworth (2010) “Even those who don't belong to either camp say it has become difficult to work in a toxic atmosphere where many have been driven to seek prescription medicine for stress, anxiety and depression…Each accuses the other of subverting the work of the school by blocking appointments and promotions in a form of "academic mobbing" that has brought the school to an impasse. The business school has become a dysfunctional work environment." The report maintains this problem goes back 20 years between successive deans and faculty and Bates is the first dean to be reappointed. Corporate deans see themselves as CEO’s of the school and their corporate faculty appointees march lockstep into the corporate model these dean’s impose. They see their work as building the reputation of the school through marketing and bringing in celebrities and of course raising lots of money. Success is not only moving up in the rankings but getting a high tech building preferably away from the liberal arts people. Bates has done just that, he was the force behind the new $27 million campus that is off campus. He also makes 3 times what a full professor makes. Is this unique? Of course not, dig deep pass the niceties of the collegial climate and one would find a cesspool of nastiness and envy. In B-schools that have an open tenure process where liberal arts faculty have a say in the promotion and tenure process the corporate faculty are often doomed exacerbating conflicts between the corporate dean and the entire faculty. This causes many deans to get a building away from the academics where they can create their own promotion and tenure process. In some cases deans create a special track for these corporate faculties called the “clinical professorships”, and they stay on forever never having to seek tenure and serve at the pleasure of the dean.

czander of NY 11:41AM April 19, 2010