Click here for the article of The Economist, February 9th, 2009
Professor Colin Mayer, the dean of Saïd Business School at Oxford University, is not taking the challenges of the times lightly.
Business education, many school representatives assure, is “counter-cyclical”—in a recession, schools attract enrolments, as studying for an MBA seems a useful way to sit out a downturn. But for schools, these are still uncertain times; many recent MBA graduates are struggling to find jobs as the financial sector pulls up the drawbridge. And large corporations, essential for schools' balance sheets as both generous benefactors and clients of pricey executive education courses, are watching their spending.
Meanwhile, bigger questions are being asked about how complicit business schools should feel in shaping the economic crisis. After all, say critics, many of those responsible for poor boardroom performance were graduates of venerable business institutions, and were, presumably, putting into practice the skills they learnt in their lecture theatres.
It is a charge that Colin Mayer, dean of Saïd Business School at Oxford University, declares he does not take lightly. For him, one of the great failings of business schools has been their failure to instil a sense of inquisitiveness in their graduates, meaning that, as corporations were failing under their noses, board members often remained blissfully unaware.
It is an accusation he doesn’t feel can be levelled at his institution. “At Oxford we deliver a more questioning form of education,” he says, “at undergraduate level the emphasis is on tutorial. Our post-graduates are taught to be inquisitive.”
Saïd has come a long way in a short time...
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