When the global recession hit the major economies last year, business schools came under widespread attack. Their alleged crime - promoting a culture of greed, callousness and social irresponsibility that fuelled the crisis. Harvard Business School (HBS) responded by doing what it knows best. It turned its own role into a case study. Were the schools guilty of moral negligence? Is it possible to prepare MBA students for personal success and enrichment - but with a social conscience?
From the infamous Gordon Gecko, the slick banker in Oliver Stone's classic Wall Street and the equally reptilian 'Masters of the Universe', depicted in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, to the gluttonous fiscal feeding frenzy, which last year culminated in the collapse of banks that were 'too big to fail', the world of finance and the MBA graduates who flock to it in their thousands in pursuit of fast millions have consistently aroused ill feeling and resentment.
The business schools took a media battering over the credit crisis, too, none more so than the biggest - with 1,800 active students at any given time - and most famous, Harvard. By March this year, MBAs had become, according to HBS alumnus Philip Delves Broughton, writing in The Sunday Times of London, 'scarlet letters of shame', and those who held them the 'masters of the apocalypse'.
In May, all 219 Harvard professors gathered in a forum of self-examination, treating themselves and their faculty as a classic MBA case study and proposing curriculum changes. In June, the Harvard Business Review included an article authored by the former dean of the Yale School of Management, Joel Podolny, entitled bluntly: 'The Buck Stops (and Starts) at Business School'. It was a damning and self-excoriating piece urging stringent re-examination of the culture and content of MBAs, the schools that teach them, and all they stand for.
In Hong Kong, business schools such as the University of Hong Kong, Richard Ivey and Manchester Business School Worldwide have focused their attention on ethics, corporate governance and corporate social responsibility since the Enron and Worldcom scandals.
Yet despite this contagious outbreak of academic mea culpa syndrome in the billion-dollar MBA industry, there has been no drop in the numbers of students applying to the schools.
