We, the People, Are We Becoming Rude?

Voting out of UPA from power in India has divided people so distinctly that it feels we only need to know how a person voted or would vote the next time to decide whether we like them or not. When someone commits a crime against us, we don’t have any desire to commit the same crime against them. We want justice. But when someone is rude, nasty or caustic to us, we want revenge. We want to make them feel the same disrespect they’ve given us. Sometimes we are simply rude in return, but situations can escalate. The acts of revenge people have indulged in could go as far as “a class 12 student shooting dead his school principal.”

Mindless debates on television have taught us to celebrate nastiness, so long as that nastiness is delivered as “honesty.” Rather than reporting news or moderating a discussion, the TV-anchors are espousing “honest” opinions so that they can say truly rude things and then expect us all to applaud them for it. We are learning from the social media that we must have an opinion, on everything, at all times, and that this opinion must be delivered in a forthright way, so that we appear assured, confident and smart.

We are living in times of incredible rudeness. This rudeness is spreading quickly and virally, almost like the common cold. Once infected by it we are more aggressive, less creative and worse at our jobs. Just witnessing rudeness makes it far more likely that we, in turn, will be rude later on. It’s in our interest to stub it out.

If knowledge makes people humble, modest, decent, disciplined, civil and considerate, then a big question surfaces – is our EDUCATION SYSTEM delivering LITERACY but not KNOWLEDGE?

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A Question Mark on Business Education

In their book “Academically Adrift” published in 2011 by University of Chicago Press, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa followed 2,200 US students over their college years, using tests designed to investigate critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving and writing. They report, “an astounding proportion of students are progressing through higher education today without measurable gains in general skills.”

Traditional subjects and methods seem to retain their educational value. Those majoring in the liberal arts fields—humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics—outperformed those studying business, communications and other new practice-oriented majors. The students who scored the LOWEST and improved the LEAST were the BUSINESS STUDENTS.

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Beneath the Mask of a B-School

The majority of students in MBAs and similar degrees come to university or institutions, with no particular interest in their programmes and no sense of how these might prepare them for future careers. Their sole motive seems often to improve a CV and get a better-paid job. The choice of a university or institutions is based on its “reputation” which is measured through campus placement records and compensation packages.

Many students spend modest time studying. The average time spent on what is supposed to be full-time higher education has been observed to be as low as 14 to 15 hours per week. This is in addition to spending, on average, 14-15 hours per week in class. Balance of their discretionary-time is spent on socialising with friends, using computers for fun, watching television, exercising, and in pursuing hobbies.

When one asks these students in informal settings why they had chosen to do an MBA, usually there are only two responses: either “to earn as much money as possible” or “don’t know but everyone is doing an MBA”. These two answers seem to illustrate two major problems for contemporary business students more broadly.

One is an instrumental and opportunistic attitude to higher education among many while the other is that many students are drifting through higher education without a clear sense of purpose.

Business-education in particular has become increasingly market oriented. The idea that students are to be regarded as a customer, even in supposedly strictly non-commercial contexts, is becoming increasingly common. This has resulted in a high level of expectations and at the same time has probably contributed to the erosion of work and study morality. There are other pieces to this puzzle as well, including shortages of funding, students working part-time, research-focused academics viewing teaching as something to minimise, large and anonymous factory-like institutions, and expensive accreditation leading to managerialism, standardisation and much “box ticking”.

In a consumer culture, market fundamentalists sometimes believe that consumer satisfaction drives quality but this may lead to a less demanding workload, fairly easy course content, entertainment in class and generous grading plus the allocation of resources by universities and institutions to non-educational arrangements (sports, counselling, career advice and so on). At many places more resources go into “Placement and student service” and administration than teaching.

Business education’s claim to be a competence-raising institution can, like many other things, must be understood as partly illusionary. The expanded business-education sector can be seen as an arrangement of doubtful substance but high on symbolic and signal value. It is a legitimising structure that gives some credibility to the knowledge society’s claims and protects such claims from careful scrutiny.

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Conversion of B-schools into Businesses

Business Schools were set up in late 19^th century as vocational trade schools. The studies of the Ford Foundation and Carnegie foundation had provided 64% of all grants to US universities both for new initiatives and for existing institutions and thus their money has had tremendous influence over the direction of education.

After the Second World War, both the Carnegie and Ford Foundations felt that business schools needed to professionalise and grow beyond their origins. Importantly, in the midst of the Cold War poor-quality business education was seen to threaten the health of the economy, democracy and the American way of life. The studies of the Ford Foundation and Carnegie foundation of 1959 led to their transformation from practical institutions into academic behemoths.

Schools were to professionalise, with faculty holding doctorates and producing graduate-level academic publications; students were to be taught quantitative methods and behavioural sciences – and only those academically qualified were to be admitted. Business schools all over the world started reinventing themselves to comply with such new expectations and the strings attached by the donors. And, while not obviously stated but clearly understood, schools were to have an anticommunist, pro-business and clearly capitalist orientation. This is the b-school model that India emulated.

The “storm” of rankings changed everything. In simple terms and for better or worse, the advent of rankings in 1987 marked the dawn of the era of business schools as businesses with the rules of the game laid down by the Foundation Studies. The U.S. News & World Report published a reputation survey of b-schools. Business Week published the first full business school assessment in 1998. Today there are other rankings provided by - Bloomberg BusinessWeek; Forbes, Financial Times, the Economist, and the Wall Street Journal.

India would not lag behind and there are now a plethora of rankings including those by Business-Today, Business India, Business World, ET, Business Standard, AIMA, MBAUniverse, Outlook, Careers360, and so on. Few people may remember what it was like before the rankings. It was a time when business schools could actually focus on improving the quality of their schools’ educational offerings. Discussions about strategic marketing were confined mostly to the marketing curriculum. PR firms were hired by businesses, not business schools. Most business schools had sufficient facilities, but few buildings had marble floors, soaring atriums, or plush carpeting. IIMs were affordable for most students, and even top MBA programs were accessible to students with high potential but low CAT/MAT scores.

What they teach and how they teach has lost focus for the leadership at b-schools. Instead, they are chasing the new indicators of quality and success for b-schools as being determined by the rankings - 

1. applicant rejection rates (how difficult is it to get admission), 
2. placements (how quickly, how early, how many aspiring recruiters, number of job offers per available student and at what emoluments), 
3. rankings (playing upon the better ones out of so many available and suppressing the inferior ones as biased), 
4. Infrastructure (marble floorings, air-conditioning, cafeteria, LCD projectors, books in the library, 
5. Advisory councils (reflecting affiliations rather than the capability of the constituent members) 
6. faculty (their credentials rather than ability and availability to teach).

B-schools are now businesses with business-to-customer marketing practices in chasing students and business-to-business marketing in chasing potential recruiters. Executive education and consulting was always about business-to-business marketing.

B-schools are on the path of evolving into trading exchanges for the managerial-talent.

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