[PEN-L:31535] MBA's

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(From Alex Cockburn's column in the latest NY Press: 
http://www.nypress.com/15/43/news&columns/wildjustice.cfm)

Fortune magazine reports that officers and directors of the 1035 companies 
that have fallen the most from their recent bull-market peaks cashed in $66 
billion worth of stock before the crash. Meanwhile those companies? 
non-insider employees were watching as their children?s college funds and 
their retirement incomes were in free-fall. Before the crash executives 
from AOL Time Warner cashed in $1.79 billion. Enron executives hauled off 
$994 million. Global Crossing?s commissars netted $951 million.

It?s clear that America?s corporate executives are, as a class, crooks. The 
percentage of "bad apples" runs at about 95 percent per barrel, honed to 
immoral conduct in costly business schools, forging grounds for a career in 
crime, the same way prisons are for the humbler classes.

Here?s a writer I don?t often quote with approval: "?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."

This is from Allan Bloom?s The Closing of the American Mind, which shot up 
the bestseller list in the 1980s. Bloom goes on to say that prospective MBA 
students have "blinders" put on them. Now, why is it that all of Bloom?s 
paranoid passages about the effects of 60s radicals and shallow 
multiculturalism on the university are quoted by William Bennett yet not 
the passage above?

Bloom was right about the MBA student. 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?

By the way, George W. Bush is the first president with an MBA.


Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org