Additional Insights for Myth 5
MBA education prepares students to manage
Reaching out to social learning
(Adapted from sections of “Higher education research beyond the ivory tower,” co-authored with Susan Mintzberg, University World News, 16 December 2023)
For the most part, university research and teaching look-on the world objectively, as if from an ivory tower, with a preference for the evidence of measured facts and deductive proofs. The alternative model, which we call reaching-out, connects to experience on the ground, for the sake of relevance. While the looking-on model maintains rather strict boundaries between the university and the so-called ‘real world’, the reaching-out model crosses these boundaries, to see the world as it really is.
Autonomous teaching is the prevalent mode of educating in today’s academic world. The professor enters the classroom, closes the door, and imparts his or her knowledge to the assembled students, who sit in neat rows, facing forward, mostly listening. Seldom can a colleague, let alone an administrator, be found in such a classroom.
In the typical MBA classroom, for example, students with little or no managerial experience sit in tiered rows, as if vessels to be filled with the theories and techniques of the business and management literature. Case study discussions may seem to reach out—to experiences in business—except that in these classrooms, the students who are supposed to pronounce on what the business in question should do next, are a long way from that experience. Management is a practice, understood by grounded experience. Is this any way to improve that practice?
There is another way. The practice of management can be enhanced by bringing experienced managers into the classroom, where they can sit at small round tables to reflect on their own experience and share their insights with each other in light of the theories and ideas introduced by the faculty (with examples in the next insert). This is social learning beyond autonomous teaching—reaching-out beyond looking-on.
As for research, great researchers reach out every which way, to find hidden clues in unfamiliar phenomena. In this respect, they are rather like Sherlock Holmes. They connect and disconnect: get close enough to their subject to uncover its essence, then step back to examine its wider consequences.
Reaching-out may hardly be new in the academic world, but it has not been prevalent, for too long marginalized by the predisposition to look on. It’s time to bring these two models together as the universities move forward in the 21st century.