Tuck received its highest ratings this year for its "well-rounded" students, their personal integrity, interpersonal and communications skills, and teamwork abilities.The rankings are based on a survey of MBA recruiters. In order, the rest of the top ten were Berkeley, Columbia, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, UNC-Chapel Hill, Michigan, Yale, Chicago, and Virginia.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Tuck Retakes #1 Spot in the Wall Street Journal Rankings
The Wall Street Journal today published its annual ranking of business schools, with Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business ranked number 1. Last year, Tuck came in second to Michigan, which fell to the seventh spot in the new rankings. The Journal had this to say about Tuck:
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9 comments:
Yet more evidence that Dartmouth's board has been captured by rich corporate "insiders" who couldn't manage their way out of a proxy voting envelope. When will it end and mediocrity return?
The account we have is that the Board members take very little interest in the actual goings-on and focus on the receptions and banquets. This may be good for some areas but bad for others. The undergraduate program, of course, fell out of the top-10 in the last US News rankings.
Actually, Tuck's success shows what can be achieved by a smart leader (Paul Danos) who has a vision (a small school with lots of student-faculty contact that runs on a tight budget). Tuck succeeds despite (because of?) the fact that Tuck is the smallest of the top ranked business schools.
Hmmm. I wonder if Dartmouth College tried something like this...
As to the Dartmouth Trustees, the only thing that they ask of Jim Wright is to pass the Cabernet. Most don't even bother to read their briefing books before meetings.
The reason for Dartmouth's decline and Tuck's rise is obviously the business school's superior Board of Overseers:
It is loaded with lazy, elite corporate types.
It has Jim Wright and Ed Haldeman as ex officio members.
It has no members elected by Tuck alumni.
This sounds like a model for Dartmouth.
Forgetting how they are chosen, the Tuck Board has about as many CEO's and business managers as it does investment bankers and asset managers. Why does the College board not have that balance? (And do not blame the alumni voters!)
Keep in mind Tuck and Dartmouth have very different missions. Arguably Tuck is in the "business" of business, whereas Dartmouth is supposed to be about the education of youth. This has ramifications not only on who is on the board, but also on who picks them.
The "education of youth" covers a lot of territory. The Ivy League has traditionally (i.e., since the mid-19th century) been a breeding ground for clubbable WASPs, with preferences specifically in disfavor of intellectuals. I think the non-petition members of the current Dartmouth Board are good examples of the expected product of such institutions. If that's what you want Dartmouth to be, that's what you're getting.
The Board, probably lagging somewhat behind the student body, probably still has quotas for Jews and minorities, for that matter.
Nice point! The only members of the Dartmouth Board of Trustees who are in academia are the last three elected petition candidates: Law Professors Smith and Zywicki, and Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution.
Wright obviously likes a Board that has no academics or senior university administrators on it; that way nobody can comment on his policies from their own experience.
Imagine the public reaction to a Fortune 500 Board of Directors that had no CEO's on it....
The difference is that CEOs actually know how to manage, operate, control, or run large enterprises. Academics are not trained in this world and are commonly thought to gravitate toward academia because it rewards lecturing or solitary research but does not require the skills of a CEO. Most academics never manage any group of people larger than a department, if being the head of a group of people who are not one's employees can be called "managing" anything. And there are no significant disincentives to doing it poorly. Intelligence, let alone education, is not enough to be a successful CEO.
The employees of the academy are the last people who should be put in charge of running it.
Once you make a generalization about a person's social class, you really can tell everything about him. Envying others' success, especially when their success seems unearned, can be a valuable research tool.
Or should a trustee's clubbability be a distant second to his profession among the characteristics that describe him? Stith-Cabranes, to use a past example, might be elite, but if you had to describe her in one word, "lawyer" would be more accurate.
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