MAE 2010 Volume: 5 issue: 6 (August)
For a long time, academic and industry leaders have debated the value of a liberal arts education. How exactly does an understanding of Plato and Shakespeare translate into a career outside of education? More specifically, of what value could a liberal arts education be to someone pursuing business?
Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, thinks there is a great deal of relevancy. He is trying to create the first liberal arts MBA. “We’re still living in a material world, but the skills that are in high demand are the intangibles: creativity, knowledge and imagination,” he wrote in the Australian Financial Review. “For talent, it has never been—and probably never will be—a better time to be skilled. Capital needs talent desperately, and in industries everywhere talent is beginning to understand just how badly it is needed.”
But does talent stem from a broad brushstroke of knowledge in the humanities, sciences and the social disciplines? David Garvin, a professor at the Harvard Business School and co-author of the recently published Re-thinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads, put the question another way. “Is business education becoming more like the liberal arts? If the question is, ‘Are we trying to teach more about how to be a well-rounded human being who happens to be practicing business,’ the answer is absolutely, ‘yes.’”
Not all students who decide to pursue a liberal arts education are motivated to do so because they don’t really know what they want to be or do when they grow up. But many are—and many have already grown up. For decades, fundamentalists have argued that a liberal arts curriculum is the cornerstone of higher education itself.
Martin’s idea to combine the general with the specific would be an interesting experiment. The knowledge acquired need not be an inch deep and a mile wide. Industry, after all, needs better decision-makers and communicators. Times have changed, and the demand for outside-of-the-box thinking is pounding at higher education’s door.
 Mark Fitzgerald, Editor 301-670-5700 x118 markf@kmimediagroup.com |
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