Where is Stanford standing in this foray?
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Creating e-business major
sparks controversy
BY DAVID LEONHARDT
New York Times
Ask deans and professors at America's leading business schools to
weigh in on what has become the hottest controversy in management
education, and some decidedly unacademic epithets start flying.
Silly. Crazy. Dishonest. Stupid.
At issue is whether the online selling, buying, marketing and
distribution of products -- known collectively as e-business -- should
be taught as a separate academic subject or as an inseparable part of
a general business curriculum. Money, prestige and the ability to
attract the most desirable students hang in the balance.
Some deans have chosen separation, creating new majors that have
rapidly become among the most popular on campus. Other deans are
rolling their eyes at what they see as an empty gimmick and are
moving instead to weave e-business into existing majors and courses.
``You're missing the point if you set up a separate program,' said
Edward A. Snyder, the dean of the University of Virginia's Darden
School.
``It seems silly to ghetto-ize it into a course or a string of courses,'
said Eric J. Johnson, a professor at Columbia Business School.
``It's almost like making it the flavor of the month,' added Robert S.
Hamada, the dean of the University of Chicago Graduate School of
Business.
What do advocates of a separate major make of such attacks?
``Crazy,' said Donald Jacobs, the dean of Northwestern University's
Kellogg Graduate School of Management. ``It is crazy not to do it
separately.' Success on the Internet calls for a very different way of
thinking than managers in traditional businesses are trained for, he
said.
The alternative approach is too slow, said Patrick T. Harker, interim
dean of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Integrating e-business throughout a curriculum ``doesn't happen
overnight,' he said, ``and anybody who says it does is not telling the
truth.'
Is that all, gentlemen? Not quite yet.
``It does happen overnight,' responded Johnson, who taught at
Wharton with Harker until this fall. ``It has happened overnight in the
real world. Business schools are trying to catch up.'
Internet fever
All the schools are devoting vast resources to writing new case
studies about the Internet, overhauling existing courses to reflect the
changes it has caused, and using online material to supplement
lectures. Deans of schools on both sides of the divide say corporate
recruiters will snap up MBAs who seem to understand how the Web
is changing the economy. And prospective students will shun any
school they see as lagging behind the Internet revolution.
But the deans part company on how best to stay abreast. ``They are
very different paths that the schools have taken,' said Cathy Baker,
the vice president in charge of recruiting at Mercer Management
Consulting, which plans to hire about 90 MBAs this year.
The debate mirrors one raging in the brick-and-mortar economy.
Some companies, like General Electric, have directed managers in
every department to rethink their business with the Internet in mind,
while others have set up separate Web divisions meant to stay free of
corporate bureaucracy.
At separate-major schools like Wharton, Northwestern, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and New York University,
professors say they are able to study e-business intensively and to
spread its lessons to other departments.
Northwestern is typical. Last spring, a committee appointed by the
dean found that its proliferating e-business offerings were too
haphazard and were leaving some gaps. So the school brought the
faculty together to fill out its course roster, eliminate overlap and
inaugurate a major in technology and e-commerce last fall.
After a first year of core subjects, students in the program take a
survey course, then choose three of 16 electives ranging from data
mining, a new class taught by an engineering professor, to the
evolution of Silicon Valley, a class that includes a weeklong California
trip to meet with dozens of chief executives.
MIT is one of several schools that have set up research centers along
with the new majors. Its Center for eBusiness draws faculty from the
business school and from media and computer science laboratories.
A success story
Carrie Oliver, 28, is in her second year at Vanderbilt University's
business school, which in 1995 became the first major school to offer
such an e-business program. After working for Sanford C. Bernstein,
an investment firm in New York, she wanted to concentrate on
studying Internet commerce and applied only to Vanderbilt, she said.
About 90 percent of her elective courses have been inside the major.
``Recruiters can't get enough of us,' she said of her class of
e-business majors. She credits the e-business label and the
specialized course work with helping her land job offers from Deloitte
& Touche, Nortel Networks and a small Internet start-up.
Faculty members at other leading schools, like those at Chicago,
Columbia and Dartmouth, are skeptical. Often, they say, the creation
of an e-business major is little more than a marketing exercise,
rearranging existing classes under a new heading.
``It's easy to raise money' for programs labeled ``e-business,'
Hamada of Chicago said, noting that dot-com millionaire alumni are
often willing to donate to them.
The skeptical schools are using other strategies. The University of
Virginia's Charlottesville campus was host to 1,000
PricewaterhouseCoopers partners for three-day sessions last summer
and fall to discuss and study the Internet. The school then rewrote
parts of its first-year MBA curriculum to reflect what it learned from
the consultants, Snyder said.
Columbia's approach has been to recruit Johnson from Wharton,
revamp syllabuses for 30 courses in the last year and create seven
new ones with heavy Internet emphasis in marketing, finance and
other departments.
These schools also know that they must work harder to broadcast the
weight they give the Internet. Their job may be easier among
corporate recruiters, many of whom put more stock in candidates'
intelligence than in course work. ``What we're looking for is talent,
and not a specific major,' Baker of Mercer said.
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