Flexner Asserts Harvard Business School Fails To Give Men Correct Comprehension of Work

The following article is composed of extracts from a treatise on graduate schools written recently by Abraham Flexner, famous educational authority and noted critic of American universities. In this treatise he particularly attacks the Harvard Business School.

Schools of business administration threaten to be a malicious influence in American life. An excellent example of these is the largest, richest, and most pretentious--the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration.

Intellectually and culturally we are not on a par with older nations, and we could not possibly be. Out universities ought therefore to be bending their energies toward drawing in to intellectual and cultural activities the most promising young brains of the nation. We are a business nation, a nation bent upon getting along, upon making money, and to the extent that universities answer this tendency and help it, they are, in my judgment, harmful, not helpful influence in the creation of an American culture and an American civilization.

Professor Frankfurther of Harvard has recently quoted a passage from John Maynard Keynes that goes to the root of the matter. 'It seems clearer every day', writes Mr. Keynes, 'that the moral problem of our age is concerned with the Love of Money, with the habitual appeal to the Monday Motive, with the social approbation of Money as the measure of constructive success'.

Fundamental Objection

In these words a fundamental objection to university business schools, as they now are, is stated. They poison the atmosphere of the university. They lure immature young bachelors of arts into money-making when the universities ought to be doing precisely the reverse, and they do it under the pretense that business is 'the oldest of the arts and the youngest of the professions'. As a matter of fact it is neither--neither an old art nor a young art, neither an old profession nor a new one. It is neither an art nor a profession at all; it is an occupation, a vocation, which no one with a proper sense of meanings would designate otherwise.

Serious Criticism

I have another very serious criticism of our so-called university schools of business. The frankest of them is the Harvard School, the faculty of which actually contains a few scholars who have a disinterested concern for the phenomena of the history of business and for the science of economics. These do not determine or greatly affect the character of the school. I call attention to a significant word in the title of the Harvard School. It is called the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. Note the word 'administration'. It means the successful carrying out of a business enterprise, which is technical, not intellectual, in quality. If there were such a thing as a university school of business, it would not be preoccupied with the training of executives and with working out a technique by which young men may win quick promotion. It would be concerned as I shall point out in a moment, with something that might have no effect whatsoever upon business success or business promotion. 'A law school does not undertake to teach success', said Justice Holmes, and he is right. The Harvard Business School takes the opposite position, and it is wrong.

Too Much Executive

The official register of the Harvard Business School claims to offer to young men going into business the training needed for practice and earlier opportunities for executive responsibility. The words that keep constantly recurring are 'executives, general executives, executive work, management, advertising as an instrument to be used by executives in order to obtain financial success'. Sections dealing with social policies, with business history from a cultural or intellectual point of view, are brief. Now the executive is only one of the four or five elements that would be prominent in a university school of business if business were a profession. The laborer is as important as the executive. The consumer is as important as the laborer; more important than executive, laborer, or consumer is the all-enveloping statesmanlike problem of general business policy. A university might have an overwhelming interest in a statesmanlike economic policy which, while diminishing the profits of individual business concerns, might have prevented or tended to prevent the world-wide depression in which, to their surprise, the Harvard Business forecasters, like other business men, unexpectedly found themselves in 1929.

Summary of Objections

I can therefore sum up almost in a word my contention. It is the university's concern to face fearlessly problems of political organization and political theory, of social organization and social theory, of business organization and business theory; but it is no concern of the university to train in a technical sense either politicians or business men. The university will make its outstanding contribution to human thought and, in the long run, to human society if it assists men to comprehend. And this is precisely what university schools of business do not do.

Business Not a Profession

I have said that I do not belive that under existing circumstances business is a profession; I do not believe that the leaders of American business have as a class a professional feeling toward their activities. What is a profession? I brush aside at once journalists, trained nurses, dancing masters, equestrians, and chiropodists, who speak of themselves as professional. One hears of professional baseball players and professional football players, but the word 'professional' has no proper significance in any such connection. There are paid football players and unpaid football players. There are paid baseball players and unpaid baseball players; but, whether paid or unpaid, they are not professional in the correct sense of the term. Professions are intellectual in character. They derive their professional character from the free, resourceful, and unhampered play of intelligence. The application of a technique which has already been worked out is routine, not professional work. To be sure, a profession is not entirely academic and theoretical; it is not only intellectual and learned, but practical, though its essential processes are intellectual, whatever the kind of technique which may be employed.

Professor Whitehead

There is at Harvard one of the greatest of living philosophers, Professor Whitehead. It is with infinite regret that one is obliged to utter a word in criticism of him; but in what, I suspect, was an amiable moment, Professor Whiteland made an address which has been incorporated in a volume published by the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. There are not lacking in this address indications that Professor Whitehead perceives the importance of a broad and disinterested study of business phenomena; but this broad and disinterested study will not lead to the immediate result in which business technicians are interested, and somehow Professor Whitehead could not lose sight of the technicians. We come, therefore, upon this startling sentence in which he differentiates between understanding, which I take to be the university's concern, and routine, which as such is no concern of the university at all except as a subject of investigation and criticism. Professor Whitehead says: 'Routine is more fundamental than understanding, that is, routine modified by minor flashes of short-range intelligence.' I call that a startling and significant sentence. The business mind is thus essentially the mind of the routineer, the darkness of which is from time to time illumined by striking a match, and Harvard University is obligated to such training. I should like to contrast Whitehead's deadly sentence with a sentence spoken by Wilhelm von Humboldt: 'The thing is not to let the scholars and universities go on in a drowsy and impotent routine. The thing is to raise the culture of the nation ever higher and higher by their means.'

Correct Attitude

Now it is not Professor Whitehead, apologizing for the teaching of routine, but it is Von Hunboldt who gives us the cue to the correct attitude of the university toward the engulfing activities called business; and yet that Professor Whitehead rather than Von Humboldt describes the current trend of university business schools is abundantly illustrated not only by the catalogues in which the schools of business set forth their aims and their offerings, but by the specific tasks which they undertake while employing a university jargon. One wonders, for example, what the real scholars and scientists at Harvard think of 'scientific research in advertising and cooperative analysis of broadcasting'. Let me quote some of the questions employed in the 'research' for which Harvard has given a prize to the Association of National Advertisers.

What effect does the summer time have on listening habits?

How do the sexes vary in their preference?

How long can a campaign be run before it begins to wear out?

To such a pass has the Harvard of Agassiz, Child, Pierce, Eliot, Haskins, Turner, and Richards come