My relatives and friends have often taunted me by saying that I have a skewed and negative opinion about business schools. I have also been exhorted to adopt a more positive approach while sharing my experiences with the community at large.
My counter to them is that there is only one truth and that is what I have always tried to portray. Today the quality of business education has become so egregious that one has to experience it to feel it. The picture looks rosy from outside but what transpires within the confines of the business school remains camouflaged from the external world. The work environment is such that even the most passionate teacher is bound to get disillusioned at some point in time.
Notwithstanding what I have said above, this brief article is a funny (or rather sardonic) take on what actually happens in B-school classrooms. Let me hasten to add that what I have written is based on the experiences of students who had pursued MBA a while ago. So it was a moment of epiphany for me when I understood the ground reality from their perspective.
Management institutes have no choice but to accept that students are their customers now and their wish has become a command for them. As I have mentioned in my articles before, teaching has become more stressful now in the era when students are digitally distracted at all points of time. The invasion of the smartphone has robbed students of their creativity as they have started relying on Google for the flimsiest of reasons. However, I wouldn’t blame only the students. Many professors too are guilty of using Google to copy/ cut and paste content in the power point presentation slides. Everyone wants to adopt a short cut. No one thinks of going through a Harvard Business Review paper and using the findings to explain a management concept. The common refrain is – “What will we get out of this?”
Unfortunately, there are teachers who circumvent the rules and regulations so that students give them a higher rating and they can continue enjoying what they have been doing. This tribe is only increasing day by day. Let us take the case of Dr.
Nandan Dwivedi (not his real name), a doctorate from Mysore University. Dr.
Nandan has been in the teaching profession since 2001 and that makes him a veteran in academics. In local lingo, he can easily be labeled a “dukhi atma” (a sad soul) for he tries to observe the negative aspects in the academic environment more than the positive aspects.
Doing research is Dr. Nandan’s favorite pastime and he keeps regurgitating one meaningless research after another. Today there is a widespread notion that those who have acquired their Ph.D. degrees have pathetic teaching abilities. This is partially true as well. Research and teaching are not two sides of the same coin. Dr. Nandan would typically enter a marketing class and start talking nineteen to the dozen about new age marketing.
What is wrong with that? I know you are tempted to ask this question. But just imagine that if you are a student and if you only had to listen to a monologue for close to 150 minutes, how would you feel? I am sure students would search for a headache balm if they have to bear with such discourses day in and day out.
Dr. Nandan, who is working in a business school in Electronic City, is close to the director of the institution. So, he ends up using students as field workers to collect data. I did have an opportunity to search for some of his papers on Google Scholar and felt that reading his research papers would be a sure-fire cure for insomnia (I did promise you at the beginning that I intend to take a humorous take on B-schools). I apologise if I sound mean and let me add that I don’t have any personal scores to settle with anyone. My argument is – why can’t academic research papers be made more interesting in a way that students as well as industry benefits from them? Rather than writing 50 research papers of dubious worth, wouldn’t it be prudent to write 10 quality research papers? The moment you say “academic research” industry professionals run in the opposite direction. I wouldn’t blame them at all.
Let me narrate the example of another faculty member who has been teaching subjects like statistics and operations research for the last 12 years. This lady teaches from the same old decrepit notebook that she used 12 years ago. She has not bothered to solve any new problems from any new textbooks. For every topic, she does one numerical problem on the board and the rest of the problems are given to students to solve in the classroom. This ensures that she doesn’t have to spend the entire duration of the class explaining to students. This lady also has an innovative method of teaching theoretical portions in the subject. She would simply open an e-book that was published in 2006 and read out the portions of the textbook. In the next 30 minutes, students would be asked to deliver power point presentations. Her agenda for the day is over. The sad part is that she doesn’t change the question papers as well for the internal exams.
In fact, the joke in academic circles is that the MBA classroom provides an excellent opportunity for teachers to laze around. Are you bored of teaching on a particular day? Just display a case study on the projector. Ask a student to read it out and then declare that students are going to have a case study test. Your class is done for the day. YouTube videos have become another source of entertainment in the classroom. Teachers explain a concept in the most laconic manner and then the rest of the class is taken over by videos followed by a group discussion!
The less said about the evaluation/assessment in business schools the better. The truth is that most B-school professors seldom read the answer sheets or go through the assignments. I don’t blame them entirely though because some of them are paranoid about forgetting their English after reading what is written on the answer sheets. Now you know the secret – why business school teachers age and grey faster!
I had an opportunity to interact with Dr. Nandan in 2016 when I had been invited as a guest faculty by his institution. Dr. Nandan had unofficially appointed one of the younger faculty members as his Man Friday. Dr.
Nandan unabashedly fired orders to him in my presence and I was wondering how Dr. Nandan could achieve this feat. Then I could make out that Dr. Nandan was close to the director and this proximity had made a mockery of the institutional rules and regulations.
I felt sorry for the younger teacher who had to serve tea to Dr. Nandan and buy birthday cakes for Dr. Nandan’s daughter (unfortunately this incident happened in my presence!). I could hear silent murmurs about how Dr.
Nandan was enjoying his stint in the institution by delegating all the work. He had become someone like a self-styled educational consultant. Consultants are those who have gained sufficient expertise in rendering dollops of advice. Friends, I hope you will agree with me that rendering free advice is one of the easiest things to do in the world. Dr. Nandan is an expert in this – I could sense this in my subsequent interactions with him.
This is only a slice of what the students narrated to me. I can write reams and reams on students’ bizarre experiences. Teachers who make students read the newspaper in the classroom and waste time; teachers who announce that there would a panel discussion in the classroom on a topic (in every class - that is the catch here) similar to what Arnab Goswami does on national television. Announcing class tests all of a sudden to unsuspecting students just to escape teaching for a day is quite common in B-school classrooms. Some teachers discuss topics of general interest in the classroom with both the teacher and the student conveniently forgetting what the subject was.
While the entire world is talking about how business schools need to focus more on students’ learning and engagement, some of the business schools are still caught in a time warp. Discussing age-old case studies that bear little relevance to the contemporary business world and triggering a classroom debate only to bide the time are other examples of faculty members using every trick in the trade to hoodwink students. Gullible students also fall prey to the sweet-as-saccharine talk of some teachers without realizing the loss that it would entail.
It has become de rigueur for academic institutions to marginally spruce up their infrastructure when a statutory audit is around the corner. Otherwise, if the photographs of the washrooms of some leading B schools were flashed in the social media, no parent would dare to send their son or daughter there. Broken chairs and benches, air conditioners that do not work most of the time, the absence of clean, drinking water and canteens that are a haven for stray dogs and cats characterize the so-called business schools that jostle for space in a crowded ecosystem and aspire for getting “accreditations”. These statutory recognitions have become the biggest mockery in today’s world but more about it some other time.
I suggest you visit at least one good college.