Is Harvard Business School too woke?
It has been an inhospitable winter in Boston. Following the resignation of Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University on January 2nd, her interim replacement said he could not recall “a period of comparable tension” at the institution. Ms Gay was ousted after a plagiarism scandal erupted over her academic work. But her position had been precarious for months; some donors were upset that she seemed to tolerate students’ antisemitic outbursts. For conservatives, Ms Gay, who was Harvard’s first black and second female president, was also a symbol of liberal elites’ fixation on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
The ostensibly hard-headed sorts who attend Harvard’s management school, and that school’s ties to harder-headed corporate America, might be expected to insulate it from wider campus convulsions. Not quite. Businesses too are facing a DEI reckoning. As a consequence, Harvard Business School (HBS) is facing pressure on two fronts.
Students at HBS are the holders of the winning tickets in the lottery of American capitalism. On average, they arrive with five years of work experience, nearly half of them from prestigious consulting or financial firms. Two years of study for the 115-year-old institution’s MBA degree all but guarantee a comfortable professional perch. Some do much better still. The fortunes of HBS alumni have helped build the school’s reputation and, thanks to their generous donations, stock its coffers (combined with annual income from MBA tuition fees, executive education, a publishing business and online courses, in 2022 the school made $966m in revenue).
2024-01-10 16:03:17
Source from www.economist.com
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