Posts filed under ‘Teaching’
University of Illinois Scraps For-Profit Subsidiary
| Peter Klein |
We noted previously the University of Illinois’s Global Campus, a proposed for-profit subsidiary that would offer an innovative, unorthodox program competing with nontraditional institutions like the University of Phoenix. Now I learn from Richard Vedder that the for-profit model has been scrapped due to objections from faculty. States the Chronicle of Higher Ed:
[P]rofessors and trustees never shared [President Joseph] White’s vision. They worried that a for-profit university would be more interested in market share than in academic quality control, and that a less-than-rigorous online wing might damage the reputation of the bricks-and-mortar institution.
Now the skeptics have scored a major victory: Mr. White has scaled back his plans for Global Campus, pitching it as an academic unit within the university, not as a separate corporate entity. The president has also scotched plans to seek independent accreditation for the online institution — a move that would have allowed Global Campus to adopt a fairly freewheeling curricular model by quickly adding and eliminating programs based on student demand.
Vedder draws a more general lesson about institutional culture and organizational inertia:
Changing the culture of existing institutions is nearly impossible. While I am all for strategies, such as bribing faculty, to try to effect a culture of innovation and receptivity to change, I think most of the dramatic new innovations will come from institutions created from scratch outside the rubric of existing universities, private or public.
Socrates’s Teaching Evaluations
| Peter Klein |
Thomas Cushman finds them in Socrates’s private papers. Where’s that hemlock when you really need it? (Via A&L Daily.)
Syllabus Exchange II
| Peter Klein |
More material for our syllabus exchange:
- Steve Bainbridge’s Business Organizations (UCLA)
- Dick Langlois’s Economics of Organization and Controversial Social Issues (Connecticut)
- Anne Miner’s Entrepreneurship Theory and Research (Wisconsin)
- Peter Lewin’s Social and Political Environment of Business (UT-Dallas)
If you have a syllabus to share, let us know.
New JC Spender Essay
| Nicolai Foss |
JC Spender is one of my favorite management thinkers. I may disagree with him, but he is usually challenging and very often profound (in contrast to some other management thinkers who have been discussed here at O&M). And he writes extremely well. JC has a new essay coming out in Journal of Management Inquiry, “Management as a Regulated Profession.” (It can also be downloaded from JC’s site). Much of the content of the paper is a discussion and diagnosis of the theory-practice gap, including pointing out that this discussion has been going for a very long time: “Redlich (1957) tells of the 19th-century German steel town that, its business failing, pressed the local business school principal to take charge. The business failed anyway, and he was put in jail — where he died — to ponder the gap between rigor and relevance. Deans beware!” (more…)
A Classroom Experiment in Organizational Economics
| Peter Klein |
I don’t do classroom experiments, but some of my colleagues find them effective. Here’s an experiment that might appeal to the O&M readership:
We present a simple classroom principal-agent experiment that can effectively be used as a teaching device to introduce important concepts of organizational economics and contracting. In a first part, students take the role of a principal and design a contract that consists of a fixed payment and an incentive component. In the second part, students take the role of agents and decide on an effort level. The experiment can be used to introduce students to the concepts of efficiency, incentive compatibility, outside options and participation constraints, the Coase theorem, and fairness and reciprocity in contracting.
See Simon Gaechter and Manfred Königstein’s paper “Design a Contract! A Simple Principal-Agent Problem as a Classroom Experiment,” available on SSRN.
Does Catholic Social Teaching Matter in the Classroom?
| Cliff Grammich |
Starting with Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum and continuing notably in the writings of Pius XI and John Paul II (and, to be sure, others as well), the Catholic Church has fostered a tradition of social teaching for application to modern business organizations. During John Paul II’s pontificate, the Church also sought to strengthen the identity and clarify the mission of Catholic higher education.
So what impact does the Church’s social teaching have in the undergraduate business classrooms of Catholic institutions? Roland and Linda Kidwell suggest it is muted; indeed, they “conclude that if Catholic institutions wish to provide an ethics-based business education, familiarity with and use of [Catholic social teaching] appear to be unnecessary at AACSB-accredited schools.” (more…)
18 February 2007 at 10:11 pm Clifford Grammich Leave a comment
The University of Phoenix and the Economic Organization of Higher Education
| Peter Klein |
The Sunday New York Times features a lengthy, and mostly unflattering, look at the University of Phoenix, the world’s largest for-profit university. The tenor of the Times piece is set by the headline, “Troubles Grow for a University Built on Profits” — the p-word clearly chosen to shock the Times’s modal reader. (Where were the stories on the Times’s Judith Miller scandal titled “Troubles Grow for a Newspaper Built on Profits”?)
What’s remarkable about the article is not the conclusion, which is largely predictable, but the form of the argument. There is no attempt to evaluate the University of Phoenix’s efficiency or profitability, the quality of its product, or the value added of its degree. (Just a few quotes from disgruntled students, taken at face value; obviously no one at the Times reads RateMyProfessors.com.) Rather, the focus is on the production function. Because Phoenix uses an unusual production technology, the Times implies, its product is suspect. (more…)
Wikiversity
| Peter Klein |
Looking for a low-cost alternative to law school or business school? Try Wikiversity, “a multidimensional social organization dedicated to learning, teaching, research and service.” Yep, it’s a wiki — we’re talking 100% user-generated content. Unfortunately there isn’t much content yet, just mostly a shell. But there are spaces for law and business as well as academic disciplines including economics, sociology, psychology, political science, history, and philosophy.
Related resources: WikiSummaries and the Open Text Project.
Is Law School a Waste of Time?
| Peter Klein |
We frequently criticize management education on these pages. To show that we’re equal-opportunity critics, we point you to this essay by George Leef, “Is Law School a Waste of Time?” Leef summarizes a recent Carnegie Foundation report taking law schools to task for “giv[ing] only casual attention to teaching students how to use legal thinking in the complexity of actual law practice” and “fail[ing] to complement the focus on skill in legal analyses with effective support for developing ethical and social skills.” Sounds a lot like business schools!
Writes Leef:
To anyone who thinks that merely because someone has graduated from law school, he “knows the law” and is capable of providing a client capable assistance, the Carnegie Foundation report is like a cold shower. It’s telling us that law students spend three or more years of their lives and huge amounts of money just to become qualified to start learning what they really need to know. While it’s true that law schools are good at instructing students in some basic things — how to do legal research and to “think like a lawyer” — the question is whether it needs to take so long and cost so much to accomplish that.
As we’ve noted before, graduate and professional degrees may function primarily as signals, but as such, they are very expensive signals. There must be more efficient ways to provide certification and social networking. (Look soon for Organizations and Markets University — for a modest fee we’ll give you a written test plus access to our private Facebook pages!)
MBA Recruiters’ No. 1 Pet Peeve: Poor Writing and Speaking Skills
| Peter Klein |
Sure, leadership, team skills, and functional integration are important. But if MBA programs continue to graduate students who can’t write and speak clearly, employers will stop paying the MBA wage premium. The WSJ’s Career Journal quotes Whirlpool’s director of global university relations Chris Aisenbrey:
“It is staggering the frequency of typos, grammatical errors and poorly constructed thoughts we see in emails that serve as letters of introduction,” says Mr. Aisenbrey. “We still see a tremendous amount of email from students who are writing to the recruiter like they are sending a message to a friend asking what they are doing that evening.”
In the WSJ/Harris Interactive survey of corporate recruiters, the top complaint is inferior communication skills.
As part of his interviews with M.B.A. students, Darren Whissen, a financial-services recruiter in California, provides an executive summary of a fictitious company and asks them to write about 500 words recommending whether to invest in the business. At worst, he receives “sub-seventh-grade-level” responses with spelling and grammar errors. “More often than not,” he says, “I find M.B.A. writing samples have a casual tone lacking the professionalism necessary to communicate with sophisticated investors. I have found that many seemingly qualified candidates are unable to write even the simplest of arguments. No matter how strong one’s financial model is, if one cannot write a logical, compelling story, then investors are going to look elsewhere. And in my business, that means death.”
As a university teacher of undergraduates, MBA students, and PhD students, I share the recruiters’ frustration with shockingly bad reading, writing, and speaking skills. However, graduate school may be too late to correct such errors. Grammar should be learned in, well, grammar school. Should universities really be investing resources in teaching remedial English, math, and science? (HT: Craig Newmark)
Grad Skool Rulz, #2
| Peter Klein |
The second in Fabio Rojas’s new series. This week’s rule: Know the unspoken rules. E.g.,
- Which courses & workshops are useful.
- How to fulfill requirements in a straightforward and quick manner.
- Certain personalities to approach or avoid.
- How to pass the graduate exams, which topics are on the exams and how to answer them.
- How to get financial and academic support in the program and from other units on campus.
- How to approach professors, as students and possible collaborators.
Syllabus Exchange
| Peter Klein |
As a new semester begins professor-bloggers are sharing their notes and class syllabi. We previously mentioned Thom Lambert’s opening lecture in his Business Organizations class. Here are some syllabi that might interest O&M readers:
- Kieran Healy’s Economic Sociology (Arizona)
- Teppo Felin’s Microfoundations of Strategic Organization (BYU)
- Pete Boettke’s Austrian Theory of the Market Process II (George Mason)
- Cory Doctorow’s Is Everyone on this Campus a Copyright Criminal? (USC)
- Henry Farrell’s Institutions and Politics (George Washington)
Night Thoughts of a Strategy Instructor
| Steven Postrel |
1. Exactly what is accomplished by teaching (present or future) managers the five forces framework? It’s useful for investment and diversification decisions, but otherwise isn’t very actionable, unless you’re engaged in cartel management.
2. It’s a good bet that the term “barriers to entry” adds zero (or worse) to student understanding of when an incumbent has advantage over a new player (and when the anticipation of that advantage deters entry). Also, students are rightly confused about the distinction between entry and rivalry because realized entry contributes to future rivalry. At least in logical terms, I can avoid this confusion by stressing the “threat of entry” as a force separate from rivalry, but then we’re supposing individual firms coordinate their price and capacity decisions to keep out entrants, a view of industry collaboration and statesmanship that was musty in the 1980s (and often involves incredible threats). Maybe it would be better just to talk about the elasticity of long-run supply and not worry too much about whether new capacity comes from incumbents or from entrants.
3. Is it a good idea to teach positioning analysis using cost drivers without having a cost function that combines all the drivers together? Scale, learning, scope, product features, etc. — shouldn’t we worry a lot more about how they reinforce or conflict with one another in a given case?
4. Does it matter that it’s really hard to find good examples that fit the technical definition of economies of scope? Is it OK if I just keep passing off multiproduct scale as if it were scope since the students don’t know the difference?
5. Am I just getting old and curmudgeonly, or does it seem like the newer Harvard cases are more pre-digested than the classics? What’s up with constructing all the pro forma tables for the students instead of scattering the information around in the text and exhibits?
6. Will I be able to teach effectively tomorrow if I don’t fall asleep soon?
Measuring Research Productivity
| Peter Klein |
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports rankings of 7,294 PhD programs in 104 disciplines at 354 US universities. The rankings are from the Faculty Scholarly Productivity (FSP) Index computed by Academic Analytics. Unlike the Business Week and US News and World Reports rankings, based largely on subjective, peer evaluations, the FSP purports to be an objective performance index. (I’m reminded of Frank Knight’s reported interpretation of Kelvin’s dictum: “If you can’t measure, measure anyway.”)
A few surprises: In economics, Johns Hopkins, Duke, and UC-San Diego make the top ten, ahead of Chicago, Stanford, and Berkeley. Iowa ranks #5 in management, behind heavyweights Columbia, Wharton, MIT, and Northwestern (Cornell and Florida also make the top ten). The top ten in finance includes Emory, Temple, Boston College, and Houston. No surprises in sociology (at least to my untrained eye).
Thanks to Rich Vedder for the pointer. Rich interprets these data as evidence that the traditional, subjective rankings are biased toward the elite universities. On the other hand, quantitative metrics for intangibles like knowledge creation can’t possibly incorporate quality in a satisfactory way.
Grad Skool Rulz
| Peter Klein |
A new feature from Fabio Rojas at orgtheory.net. Highly recommended for (current or prospective) graduate-student readers.
I have some resources for graduate students listed on my site. A few are specific to my own department, but most are general (especially “Writing, speaking, and listening,” “Teaching,” and “Miscellaneous”).
It’s Built to Last, But Is It Made to Stick?
| Peter Klein |
Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Random House, 2007) is being touted as the Next Big Thing in the popular management literature. Here is the Amazon link. Here is Guy Kawasaki’s interview with the authors. Here are words of praise from Bob Sutton. And yes, of course, the authors have a blog.
Top Posts of 2006
| Peter Klein |
As 2006 draws to a close we reflect on our most popular posts of the year. (Actually, we’ve only been in operation since April, so these are our most popular posts of all time, but you get the idea.) Here’s the list, followed by some commentary:
1. Is Math More Precise Than Words?
2. Intellectual Property: The New Backlash
3. Dilemmas of Formal Economic Theory
4. We Need Some Economics of Pomo
5. The New Bashing of Economics: The Case of Management Theory
6. Has Corporate Corruption Increased?
7. HRM in Heaven and Hell
8. Yale’s New MBA Curriculum: “Perspectives,” Not Functions
9. Malthus and the “Dismal Science”
10. Formal Economic Theory: Beautiful but Useless?
11. Why Do Sociologists Lean Left — Really Left?
12. The SWOT Model May Be Wrong
13. Multi-Culturality and Economic Organization
14. What Do We Really Know About Organizations?
15. Academic Insults: CCSM Edition
16. A Nobel for Entrepreneurship?
17. Price as a Signal of Quality
18. Economics: Puzzles or Problems?
19. Another Irritating Practice
20. Market-Based Management
Now, we’re talking small numbers here — the Drudge Report we ain’t — so the ranking is highly sensitive to random events, like an incoming link from Marginal Revolution. Nonetheless, some clear patterns emerge. (more…)
Yale’s New MBA Curriculum: “Perspectives,” Not Functions
| Peter Klein |
Several wire stories and bloggers are reporting on Yale’s new first-year MBA curriculum. Increased study-abroad requirements are getting the most attention, but the reorganization of the core curriculum may be more significant. Says Yale:
In the last thirty years, while the management profession has changed significantly, management education has not. Most business school curricula remain compartmentalized by discipline — Marketing, Finance, Economics, and so forth. This model made sense when a successful career was characterized by vertical advancement in a single field within a large, functionally divided corporate bureaucracy. But today, managerial careers cross the boundaries of function, organization, and industry, as well as cultural and political borders. Even managers in large organizations must be entrepreneurial in the sense that their success depends on their ability to synthesize disparate information, analyze competing functional priorities, and draw together and coordinate resources and individuals in a context that is often fluid and decentralized.
Now, [Yale’s School of Organization and Management] is breaking down traditional management disciplines just as contemporary organizations blur the distinctions among management functions. Rather than teaching management concepts in separate, single-subject courses like Finance or Marketing, Yale’s approach teaches management in an integrated way — the way in which most managers must function every day to achieve success.
The Vertical Dis-Integration of Higher Education
| Peter Klein |
In 1975, 56.8 percent of the teaching faculty at US colleges and universities were tenured or on the tenure track, with 30.2 percent classified as part-time employees. By 2003, tenured and tenure-track faculty comprised only 35.1 percent of the teaching staff, with part-timers making up 46.3 of the total. These data are from the latest AAUP report on faculty employment, sounding an alarm over the rise of what it calls “contingent faculty.” (Thanks to Richard Vedder for the pointer.)
This trend may have important implications for academic freedom, faculty governance, political correctness, and the nature of higher education more generally. From an economic efficiency perspective, it looks like vertical dis-integration, a shift from long-term employment contracts to shorter-term, more flexible arrangements. If the higher-education sector is simply following the private sector’s lead, should we be surprised? And what factors would be driving the changes — a decrease in relationship-specific human capital, an increase in modular methods of production, changes in environmental uncertainty, etc.? (more…)
How to Grade Essay Exams
| Peter Klein |
As students relax and return home for the Christmas holiday, we professors are stuck with grading — not always the most pleasant task. I’m holed up this weekend with two stacks of essay exams. As an experienced teacher, my grading technique is a finely honed skill. For newcomers, however, here is a primer on grading essay exams from Daniel Solove. It covers all the key points — the importance of the toss, the bottom-higher-grade theory, teetering, exam protrusion, and separation. I wish I’d known all this when I was just starting out! (Via Christine Hurt.)
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