The Affluent Classroom

ASHER EDELMAN generates equal amounts of enmity and sympathy for offering $100,000 to that student in his class who could find a likely corporate takeover target for the master of that financial maneuver. Most business school administrators, including Thomas R. Piper, a Harvard B-School administrator, roundly criticized Edelman's offer, charging that it violated the sancitity of the classroom.

Of course, none of Edleman's students seemed to feel that way; to them, he was merely providing an innovative, hands-on approach to studying business--which is presumably why Columbia hired Edleman in the first place.

But if Edelman's business school community critics seem somewhat foolish in their outrage, we should not be so quick to condemn them for standing up for the integrity of the classroom, regardless of how illusory that principle must be at any school of business.

A business school's purpose is such that if Edleman's methods were inappropriate, logic fails to bring one to that conclusion. After all, the New York businessman was supposed to be teaching his students how to take over a company, and in such transactions, a lot of money is at stake. As one of Edleman's students said, the offering of the money made the assignment both more challenging and more realistic; it helped them learn as much as it tantalized them with visions of wealth. Just like the elementary school assignment in which you have to write a business letter which will actually be mailed, Edelman was doing his best to make the classroom exercise jive with the real world. And in the corporate universe, takeovers and raids are not intellectual enterprises; they're business ventures which seek to turn a profit for the raider.

NONETHELESS, the Columbia Business School dean and many of his colleagues found something unsettling about Edleman's pedagogical techniques. The classroom is supposed to be a sacred refuge for higher pursuits Professors should not be in the practice of having their students turn a profit on their final exams. The paradox is a diffcult one: Edelman was literally teaching his students well, and yet he seemed to be engaging in practices inapproriate for an academic setting.

The paradox ultimately raises the question about how legitimate it is for Columbia to have a Business School in the first place. To condemn Edelman on the grounds that he was violating standards of the acadmey rings hollow. Columbia Business School Dean Thomas Burton sounds hopelessly naive when he says that Edleman would "bias the academic atmosphere" by offering a monetary incentive to students studying how to pull-off a corporate raid effectively. How academic a setting could a how-to-corporate-raid class ever be? How does one study in an intellectual way the practicing of making lots and lots of money?

It requires a great amount of pretense to pass off a business school as a part of an academic community. But we should not be so quick to mock that pretense. So long as universities take as part of their mission the education of future businessman, lawyers, and doctors, they will always be something less than committed to a purely intellectual ideal. But it is at least nice to see that they have some regrets about this state of affairs--that a Business School such as Columbia still is commited to the acadmeic ideal enough that a professor such as Edleman is not allowed to use his students as consultants and his classroom as an office.

To the extent that business schools are sponsored by universities, they inevtiably make an institution whose aim is to teach the liberal arts seem somewhat anachronistic. Why is a classroom sacred? Why should it be something other than just a place to learn the tools for a future career? For reasons which are not easy to define, it is good to believe that a classroom must be kept uncontaminated by careerism. And thus it is nice to hear Dean Burton waxing metaphysical on the sanctity of learning, even as he heads a school whose purpose is to train businessmen.