Here's the article:
"Is It Time to Retrain B-Schools?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/business/15school.html
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Here's my response:

From what I saw of business education during my college teaching career, it was totally amoral. Oh, the students had to take a course in business law, but they were encouraged to see the bottom line as the be-all and end-all of business, as long as they followed the letter of the law.

At one college, a professor of human resources management was let go after one year because the rest of the faculty thought her approach was too "touchy-feely." In other words, she advocated treating employees as human beings and stakeholders in the business instead of as an expense line on the balance sheet.

This "bottom line only" approach has had a pernicious effect on our entire society. Corporations feel no obligations to their employees, to the communities they're located in, to their countries, or even to their customers (witness the decline and depersonalization of customer service in every industry). They care only about the financial enrichment of the executives and the major shareholders. This attitude is exacerbated by the upper middle class to upper class origins of many business graduates. Ordinary workers are barely human beings to them.

It's enough to turn one into a Maoist. Perhaps no one should be allowed to enter business school unless he or she has worked full time for two years at a low-level job, say the assembly line or the loading dock or the data entry pool or the cleaning staff or the cafeteria staff. I bet we'd see a very different type of corporation if the top executives had put in time as bolt tighteners, package loaders, keyboard tappers, toilet scrubbers, or casserole disher uppers.

Good to hear it,
Bringing some truth to one of the greatest purveyors of disinformation in the world!

p.s. Your comment reminds me of the documentary the Corporation, also another one Enron the Smartest Guys in the Room.

Website = http://www.good.is/

In inner-city Philadelphia, a pilot program is arming its high schoolers with laptops. But in countries like Norway—and increasingly in the developing world—that’s the norm. Why is the United States so behind? And is it worth it to play catch-up?
http://www.good.is/?p=14863

Once they're in the officer's mess, there is the stigma of the 45, and that
officers can shoot enlisted men for insubordination. And the corporate equivalent
is the sacking and demeaning of workers.

Business school classes like organisational behavior are entire classes on creating
a brainwashing environment to keep people working for less and not forming unions.
Accounting classes discuss and recognize the standard ways of tweaking a balance sheet
from selling off assets to re-stating depreciation schedules. Economics classes
present nothing but pure milton friedman teachings... and no matter what your
bolt tighter has learned on the factory floor in his heart - this learning is
swept away by the teachings of the commanding heights.

There, the bolt tightener is just a resource to be exploited in the work force of
top down darwinian competition between various businesses that are supported by
government market subsidies. The top executives will behave like military commanders
as business is just a proxy for militarism.

The types of people who go for MBAs are typically upper middle class to upper class suburbanites. They have never mingled socially with working class people, never spoken to them except to give orders. In their minds, working class people are no more individual or human than pawns in a chess game, to be sacrificed to protect the king and queen.

I saw this attitude many times at Yale. Every year, the local phone company rented Woolsey Hall for its holiday program and party, and the Yalies who were hired to work that event would stand around snickering at the way the workers dressed or spoke or the songs they sang. It was pure up-front class bias. There were the Yalies who would chant "State school! State school!" whenever Yale played an off-season game against UConn or other public institutions. There was the Yale president's response to claims by the clerical workers that they were eligible for food stamps: "If you want more money, you should get a better job." Yalies typically referred to Newhallville, a neighborhood of middle-class, upwardly mobile African-Americans near the Forestry School, as "the jungle."

I never bought into the "we're a better grade of human being because our family has been going to Yale since 1710" garbage. But I did buy into much of the economically conservative politics.

Until...

Until I became one of the classic unemployed Ph.D.'s and spent three years off and on working for temp agencies. My secretarial skills were next to worthless, so I worked mostly industrial jobs with some low-level clerical work. I saw what life looks like from the bottom and more importantly, what the guys at the top look like viewed from below.

I saw that most of my co-workers were not stupid (some were, but most weren't), just disadvantaged in some way. I began to understand how factory workers are kept on a tight leash: The bosses choose the meanest, dumbest person on the assembly line and promote him or her to be a supervisor. The idiot thinks his/her job is to yell at the line workers and tell them to work faster and not talk.

Conditions are deliberately kept uncomfortable--you're standing on a concrete floor all day, even though there is no reason why you have to be standing. (At one plant, a woman in an advanced state of pregnancy had a doctor's note saying that she had to sit down while working, and it didn't seem to slow her down any, but the rest of us had to stand.)

The bosses ignore health and safety regulations. (I won't be surprised if I develop lung cancer or some other lung disorder, despite being a life-long non-smoker, due to working without breating gear in air saturated with fine particles.)

The workers put up with it and gave a good day's work for low pay. The only time I saw workers taking advantage of their boss was in a small plant where the owner was an alcoholic who drank himself into a stupor every day. When he passed out, the workers would sneak out for a two-hour lunch, and by the time he woke up, they would be back, claiming that they hadn't finished the day's quota and would have to do overtime. I'm sure that company didn't stay in business much longer.

Even at the lower levels there was a caste system: clerical workers rank above factory workers. At every company, factory workers arrived at 6:00 or 7:00AM, worked till 2:30 or 3:30, and were not paid for their 30 minutes of lunch. One place required workers to clock out for their 10-minute coffee breaks. Another gave only one 10-minute coffee break and a 20-minute lunch.

Clerical workers arrived at 8:30 or 9:00, worked till 4:30 or 5:00, received an hour for lunch and two 15-minute breaks. They never punched a time clock. However, in the offices that had adopted the new-fangled invention of word processing, their keystrokes were electronically monitored, and anyone caught day-dreaming or making too many corrections was reprimanded.

The experience completely undid any respect I had for conservative economics, especially during the Reagan recession, when the owners knew that the workers who still had jobs were afraid to rock the boat.

Most MBAs have not had experiences like these. I think that at least a few of them would treat their employees differently if they had.

I lived in New Haven for a few months, a lifetime ago whilst working at NASDAQ - this
was 1986. I had a second job working the cleaning shift at the macdonalds in west
new haven north of the yale bowl about a mile or so. "westville" - i think this was
called.. but something west near a lovely river park. I wasn't earning enough to get
a car that would run, and i had bad credit, so i was renting a modest flat in new
haven and commuting to trumbull. Then i'd drive home to new haven and get on my
macdonalds uniform and head right up the street to the macdonalds - at least that
was a walking commute. The work was slightly above minimum wage, and it was staffed
otherwise by young persons from west new haven.

I didn't smoke grass back then, so i was really exhausted by the work of the 2 jobs
and i couln't afford the time to chill - just paying the bills took all of my time,
i wondered how people in relationships had any time whatsoever to be together or
to meditate.. poverty sucks time. But in this time at macdonalds, i saw how all the
staff worked in this pre-arranged affirmation of mediocrity. Beep beep beep - the
machine insists that you jump - flesh monkey. Nasdaq likewise, the people jumped
every time the machines beeped, but they were paid more for it by orders magnitude.

The shift ended at 2am or however long it took to do the closeup.
And the system at macdonalds for cleaning is intensive, involving holding a hot
sprayer with scalding water capable of hosing off the grease of a day's fries from
the under-pan of the fry tray. There was a loose step, and one of my collegues told
me that the way to make it was to fall off the step and tumble down the stairs,
and then to sue macdonalds for a million dollars. When the wages are too low to
live independently, some employers seek out the dependent wage earner, as dependents
take orders better... and then what kind of society pays a whole person half a wage?

But what i was meaning to say about new haven, is that i would spend my free time back
in those days, doing exercise like jogging, and i ran the streets of new haven from
yale to the west in various evening jogs. Some of the streets were quite beautiful,
and i liked new haven in parts. But i also found parts of new haven, right near yale,
that were some of the most degenerate slum areas i'd ever seen on the east coast
barring the bronx and boston and bridgeport of course. The poverty was rank, and
i was shocked that a university like yale coexisted with this kind of thing.
After seeing UCLA and Stanford in California, there is nothing like the rank
poverty right next to the university - i was really shocked to see that some
serious class elitism must exist historically in that place that puts such
poverty in sight of such wealth - that students of the rich can be served
and cleaned-up after by a permanent slave class neighborhood. "New Haven"
was not so impressive - i was glad to leave.

It was really hard working 2 jobs, and i gained immense respect for the people
who work in food service so that people can have cheap eats... they are undercut
and demeaned to low pay and overwork by systems that force certain things to be
done for no-overtime, even if closing happens at 2:45... and then to be at work
by 8 at another job had me really exhausted. And during that time, i never
ever read a newsapper or watched TV outside SNL or a football game... just
surviving with a positive bank balance and a running car was hope enough.
I don't recall any politics at that macdonalds except beastie boys at full volume.