Harvard is not at fault?! Give me a break.
Academia is starting to raise its defense to the suggestion that perhaps it might have to accept some culpability for the present financial melt down. I am picking on Harvard not because it alone is to blame, but because CNBC raised the issue in a story on Harvard Business School and because Harvard had more than its fair share of graduates, both lawyers and businessmen, at the epicenter of the problem.
When CNBC, whose special on Harvard Business School, which was clearly designed to promote the institution, raised a few tough questions to maintain the appearance of objectivity, such as did the school contribute to the culture that created the problem we face, they answered the question by selecting to interview Jamie Dimon, the CEO of Chase. He defended the school by saying they do not teach you how to be bad people. That would certainly be an answer for an Enron situation, but it is hardly an answer to a wide spread systemic failure of the financial system. Too many graduates of Harvard Business School, Harvard Law School and a collection of other prestigious business schools and law schools had to be willing participants for this to be attributed to personal failures.
For all the claims about the value of case study method of Harvard and the optimistic predictions of a professor at Harvard Business School who is in self-denial, one thing is clear. These prestigious graduates engaged in fundamentally the same conduct that caused the tulip boom and crash of the 1600’s. So what was it they paid $180,000 to learn?
