The Lambs of HBS

Sinners in the hands of an angry Harvard Business School (HBS) have much to atone for these days. Last week, 119 HBS applicants caught an early glimpse of their admissions decisions and have been damned to rejection for it. Duly frustrated, the sacrificial lambs of a business establishment’s desire to clean up its image—torn and tattered after being embroiled in years of corporate scandals—are being told to suck it up and repent.

The trouble started when this story’s only true ruffian, one who goes by the online alias “brookbond,” posted to BusinessWeek.com’s online forums with instructions for finding out business school admissions decisions for schools, like HBS, who use the ApplyYourself online application system These instructions included advanced “hacking” techniques, previously exclusive to the domain of 8-year-old Microsoft Word users, of “copying” and “pasting” text—including their own personal identification numbers—into the URL of their internet browser’s address box. At no point did these students lie, misrepresent who they were, or use passwords that they should not have been privy to. The pages they were accessing were published on the internet but had not yet been hyperlinked to their main application pages. To be explicit, it would be the equivalent of going to www.mygrades.edu/user123/grades.html and finding that your grades had not been posted yet, and then proceeding to edit the URL to www.mygrades.edu/user123/grades/now/foruser123.html in order to find them there early.

HBS has used the dubious reasoning that these applicants should have known better as grounds for calling their behavior, according to HBS Dean Kim B. Clark, “unethical at best,” when it was in fact an innocuous lapse in judgment at worst. In total, over a short 9-hour time window, 119 applicants did the surreptitious deed. We can hardly imagine that many more students came across the instructions and resisted their obvious temptation, and we don’t believe their decision makes them any more qualified for business school if they did. If this action was some sort of indication of the worst behaviors our future business leaders, the business ethics community has much to celebrate.

To further complicate matters, HBS’s inexplicably rigid reaction—it has issued a blanket rejection of all applicants who accessed the unpublished decisions website—leaves no room for the possibility that the individuals accessing the decisions page were not the applicants themselves. Clark has stated that applicants should be responsible for their passwords, implying that HBS would not consider cases in which curious spouses, siblings, or other people accessed decision websites. Stanford Graduate School of Business’s policy of dealing with applicants on a case-by-case basis is more reasonable and flexible.

Ultimately, if HBS is looking for a place to lay blame, it should look no further than ApplyYourself, whose security measures to keep applicants from the decisions website were the true culprits. ApplyYourself Chief Executive Leonard A. Metheny Jr. has stated that ApplyYourself is exploring taking legal action against individuals for using “a procedure that was not intended to be used.” Good luck. Metheny should instead dedicate his company’s resources towards making sure further failings do not compromise its clients’ security and privacy.

To be sure, HBS has scored a media victory with its hardline stance. Americans have been looking for a sign from the business community, particularly its leading educational institutions, that business ethics are a priority. HBS’s false bravado has given them one, leaving 119 victims in its angry hands.