The Copenhagen Round Table was an opportunity to reflect on the future of undergraduate business education. UBC Sauder School of Business and the Copenhagen Business School (CBS) have formed what we are calling a “strategic alliance” — in other words — beyond the generic Memorandum of Understanding towards something real and meaningful. So much so that each business school has contributed $$ into a fund that will support projects and programs — mainly connecting people between Vancouver and Copenhagen.
I was invited to the “Re-Thinking Undergraduate Business Education Workshop” October 21-22 in Copenhagen. My seven weeks spent at the CBS was the most fruitful of my sabbatical travels, finding like-minded colleagues and lots of energy on a number of fronts.
From the workshop program:
The Carnegie Foundation for Excellence in Teaching has recently published a report, Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession (Jossey-Bass, 2011). The report is positioned within the societal context of ongoing debates about the purpose of undergraduate education for business in society.
The report makes a case for the integration of ‘liberal learning’ with business studies as a way to develop students’ capability to engage in practical reasoning about the major socio-economic challenges currently shaping the business landscape. Following an overview of the parallel histories of business education and the liberal arts in the US, the authors provide a richly detailed account of the classroom pedagogies, curriculum designs, and institutional frameworks through which these two traditions can be effectively integrated.
Pierre Guillet de Monthoux is the Chair of CBS’s Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy. The Department is full of people who you wouldn’t always imagine to be in a business school — but you are glad they are there! Pierre was an amazing host for the event. We met in the Danish Academy of Sciences — an intimate space that was perfect for the ~ 60 invitees mainly from Europe with a few North Americans thrown into the mix.
Bill Sullivan — one of the authors of the book — was on-hand to provide the context for the sessions with background from the book which was a study from the Carnegie Foundation. He gave us the background on why the study was conducted and “how” it was conducted – the methodology.
Here is a snippet from his introductory session:
A teachable moment: make an opportunity for learning. The Economic Crisis was/is a teachable moment. Why has this happened? At this scale? What next? An opportunity to validate the worth of business in the academy. The idea of understanding failures to understand best practices. However — in most cases — the teachable moment was missed. Instead there was a sense of “business as usual” where neither b-faculty or b-students cracked open these findings. It was a chance to prove that business schools house fully reflective practitioners — not just technicians.
More to come in the next blog.