Jeg vedlegger en miljøskildring fra Columbia Business School. Det er vel noe
slikt mange drømmer om å få til på norske universiteter. Artikkelen er fra
"Left Business Observer", se
http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html
Den er gjengitt her med tillatelse fra redaktøren.
Trond Andresen
******************************************************
STUDYING ARROGANCE
by “V.”(*)
The year began with what we later called the Nuremberg
Rally. Five hundred of us sat in an auditorium at Columbia University
and watched in horror as a student official led us in a
cheer. “What is the best business school in the world?” “C-B-S”
came the reply. “Where do we most want to be?” “C-B-S” the audience
chanted back weakly.
It was the start of orientation at Columbia Business School,
one of the top ranking B-schools in the country. Some 400 incoming
students were gearing up for the chance to become very,
very rich. Not me, though. In my real life, I’m a business journalist,
and I was there because I’d been awarded a Fellowship by the
University’s school of journalism. The idea was for 10 of us financial
scribblers to study business formally so that we would be better
trained to go back to do our jobs. For one year I was to live
among the business students, take classes with them and, if I
were smart enough, learn how to discount a cash flow.
Learned behavior.
In my years overseas as a correspondent,
I often wondered why American businessmen were so
much more smug than everyone else. I met an entrepreneur
who’d only just arrived in Prague but was already telling the locals
they should not let the elderly live in rent-controlled apartments
because they needed to apply free market principles to the
housing sector. In Asia I’d seen Japanese and Korean businessmen
quietly make money while Americans constantly berated
the government for not opening up markets to foreigners and for
not devaluing their currency further so as to cut costs for foreign
employers (a devaluation that would have the effect of raising
import prices for the easily overlooked locals). In Europe, there
was a noticeable difference between the relatively low-key local
execs and their swaggering American counterparts, who took
every opportunity to lecture the world on how great capitalism is,
especially the American kind. Now, after only one semester at B-school,
I think I know the answer: smugness and an unquestioning
belief in the American Way are crucial parts of the curriculum.
The first thing that struck me about CBS (the business school,
not the TV network) is how posh and comfy it is. The classrooms
are gorgeous; many were paid for by the major investment banks
so they have names like “Merrill 309” or “Lehman Lounge.” We’re
given free pizza and t-shirts at every turn. Happy Hour on Thursdays
comes with free food and beer often sponsored, like the
classrooms, by Wall Street firms. Teachers take notes for us and
hand them out at the beginning of each lecture. Homework assignments
are downloaded off the Web, while the younger professors
use Power Point presentation software to give lectures.
The faculty are generally warm and helpful and the Deans and
student activities office seem to be there purely to make our lives
easier. Even the toilets flush automatically. In short, CBS feels like
a cross between a summer camp for rich kids and a luxury hotel.
The amount of handholding is extraordinary: we started off
with a week of intensive math classes and computer training to
bring us up to speed for the grueling work that lay ahead. Free
tutoring is available during the term, office hours and review sessions
abound. It’s clear that having charged students $26,000 for
a year of tuition, there is no way the school is about to let us fail.
I was amazed by all the high-tech whiz-bangery. The library is
a zoo, with everyone working on group projects and taking calls
on their cell phones. Cell phones aren’t allowed in class but are
OK in review sessions. And when lectures get boring, the students
log onto the Web (all students have to own a laptop in order
to attend) and trade stocks or send email to their classmates.
Anyone who wants to study in quiet leaves the B-school library.
The empty Southeast Asian studies building and the 19th century
architectural library are the preferred spots for peaceful reading.
There is a veneer of complete friendliness especially during
the first few weeks when everyone wants to make friends that
belies the competition lurking beneath the surface. That emerges
in full fury after the first month as students break into cliques,
many of them organized along ethnic lines (Chinese, Latin
Americans, Jews…). In some ways it’s like being back in high
school again but without the druggy rebel element.
Diversity.
CBS prides itself on its ethnic diversity: 28% of the
students come from overseas, and domestic “minorities” make
up about 20%, but there are limits -- lots of the white guys look
like ex-football players and the white women like ex-cheerleaders.
There’s a small group of “nonprofit” types -- journalists or
refugees from arts organizations -- but they’re practically invisible,
avoiding the library and the B-school buildings.
The classes are taught according to the Party Line of our time.
Unfettered free market capitalism is the only way to run a society,
job losses are an inevitable byproduct of mergers whose inevitable
consequence is to boost investment banker (I-banker, in
the CBS argot) fees, and the whole damn world better get used to
free trade. Our corporate finance professor taught us how to
value companies in order to determine whether to continue running
a “value-destroying” company or whether to shut it down
(since maximizing “efficiency” is the only appropriate metric).
Unusually, the professor stopped class to point out that firing
people is not pleasant and usually involves denying your real
plans that is, lying during the takeover process. But when I
asked whether it might not be better to keep the company running
instead of seeking the short-term share price rise that results
from such liquidations the professor replied by telling me “Capitalism
is not perfect but it is the best system there is.” A profession
of faith beats a serious counter-argument anytime!
In international business class I learned how to use transfer
pricing to reduce my company’s overall tax burden and we did
math problems to calculate how much profit to shift to low tax
countries before returns would start to diminish. Our textbook
(written by celebrity economist and newly minted New York
Times columnist Paul Krugman) even had math problems and a
whole section devoted to explaining why it’s not exploitation to
pay $20 a month to workers in developing countries. Currency
devaluations were explained as a good thing but no one bothered
to tell the students that IMF structural adjustment policies
sometimes lead to mass impoverishment and food riots.
Ethics.
Putting aside the ethics of what we were taught I began
to worry about the disservice being done to the students.
How can they do labor negotiations in Mexico if the case studies
don’t explain that the unions are government-run? What will they
do the next time there are mass protests in Jakarta because of a
recent IMF agreement? It seemed to me the students were only
getting half the story.
In the B-school world personal integrity and volunteerism are
enough to make the world a better place. The system is fine as it
is, completely undeserving of fundamental scrutiny. As one of
my colleagues put it: “They teach us that we are doing everybody
a favor by making money off them -- that this is how developing
countries will end poverty.”
One of my professors told us she would turn us into free traders,
but she hadn’t reckoned on the Asians in the class who tried
to explain that Korea built up its car industry by protecting the
domestic market from foreign imports. Indeed most of the students
had trouble coming up with answers the day the Professor
asked us to explain the advantages of free trade. In my Pacific
Basin Economies class the Professor has been similarly stymied.
Asian students in the class keep mentioning the problem of the
growing gap between rich and poor countries. Each week the
professor trots out a “Pareto-optimality” graph designed to show
that even if the gap is widening, those on the bottom are still
gaining so there is really nothing to worry about. (Vilfredo Pareto
was an Italian economist and sociologist of antiegalitarian and
protofascist sympathies who was an early theorist of income distribution,
meaning apologist for inequality.)
Ideology.
I wish I could say that the students were progressive,
but for the most part they’re not -- though a number call
themselves Democrats. Hallway conversations are usually about
how much money students expect to earn and what interviews
the industrious B-school job service has arranged. All the major
companies recruit on campus, invite interested students to expensive
dinners, and ferry them home afterwards aboard limos.
The B-school provides extensive résumé coaching, watermarked
stationery, and a mandatory house style. Most students want to
do something dot.com-ish or go into consulting, with a few old-fashioned
stalwarts eyeing careers in investment banking or on
the trading floor. As the school newspaper, The Bottom Line
whose slogan in a recent issue was “we will work for food” put
it in a recent editorial, “We are on the path to employment excellence
and it feels awesome.” The prose is as fresh as the thinking.
One of the administrators told me Columbia discontinued its
ethics classes because they want to incorporate ethics into day-to-
day activities, something I can’t say I have noticed (although
the students do do a lot of volunteer work and many serve on
nonprofit boards). In one class we did discuss the ethics of paying
bribes overseas but only about half the students thought it
was wrong. There is an integrity board which is meant to punish
cheating (laptop theft is common and the first issue of The Bottom
Line last semester had an article about a B-school graduate
who was busted for trying to resell a computer stolen from the
school) but its bulletin board lay untouched from May to November
when someone finally came along and took down the few
faded posters and announcements that were there.
You will be happy to know that the solutions for the major
world crises are simple. If Asian countries had had better banking
supervision and less cronyism the 1997 crisis would not have
happened. If those pesky developing nations could just stop all
their pointless protectionism they could get rich too. And back at
home, we love the stock market and know that it’s going to keep
rising forever.
-- (*) V., obviously, is a pen name.
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