Re: MBA's

[Nick Fredman <nfredman@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Proyect quoting Cockburn quoting Bloom

> "?a great disaster has
> occurred. It is the establishment during the last decade or so of the MBA
> as the moral equivalent of the MD or the law degree, meaning a way of
> insuring a lucrative living by the mere fact of a diploma that is not the
> mark of scholarly achievement?the prebusiness economics major, who not only
> does not take an interest in sociology, anthropology or political science
> but is also persuaded that what he is learning can handle all that belongs
> to those studies. Moreover, he is not motivated by the love of the science
> of economics but by love of what it is concerned with-money."

For my sins I have ended up working in the publishing unit of the 
graduate business school of a small regional uni. While it is 
generally mind-bendingly boring (though I can squeeze in a bit of 
computer related political work while my supervisor, a leftie and a 
pioneer in indigenous education who is also a bit grumpy about 
working here, isn't looking or pretends not to look), it is sometimes 
interesting to see how aspiring capitalists are trained, and also a 
revelation how Mickey Mouse the MBA program is. Of course due to 
funding cuts the uni has encouraged this school to frantically run 
around China, Malaysia, PNG as well as Oz selling its wares to 
full-feeing paying managers and their corporate backers, and it seems 
a flimsy course can only help.

Louis further says

> Anyone who attended an American
> university in the 80s or 90s can remember those smug fellows who dreamed of
> the riches derived from a Wharton or Harvard MBA. (The role model was
> Donald Trump with his degree from the Wharton School of Finance.) Who can
> forget their superior attitude toward their fellow students who were
> wasting their time in the humanities department?

The students must learn smugness along with Accounting 101. The 
academics and management here have this strange idea that their 
money-generating abilities make them far superior to other schools, 
which are parasites on the public purse, even though it should be 
fairly obvious that their product alone is aimed solely at people who 
can pay full fees. At a staff meeting during a bureacratic fight 
around the merging of the several schools which have business-related 
programs, after it was revealed that the dastardly Tourism department 
claimed it needed more rather than less public funding, one of the 
bourgeois ideologists got up and declared "is this a school of 
tourism, or of socialism?!".
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