Lit at B-school

December 10, 2015 12:28 PM

Better Management Through Belles Lettres
posted by the man of twists and turns (9 comments total)

I'm scratching my head trying to think of something to add to this piece, but how can one possibly top the Invisible Man bit?
posted by No Robots at 1:39 PM on December 10, 2015

I thought this was satire until I googled the professor's name. Then I thought maybe it was a long con satire, so I went to the columbia.edu website and looked up the course listing. Now I'm just dumbfounded.
posted by OrangeDisk at 2:47 PM on December 10, 2015

This is why you used to get a humanities undergrad degree BEFORE going to B-school.
posted by KingEdRa at 2:50 PM on December 10, 2015

If you're going to manage humans, it makes a lot of sense to follow studia humanitatis. Moral philosophy is something that is sorely needed in business.
posted by fraula at 3:22 PM on December 10, 2015

That would be true if moral philosophy made you more moral. But I don't think it does.
posted by grobstein at 4:12 PM on December 10, 2015

"Merve Emre" is a great pseudo-palindrome.
posted by kenko at 4:36 PM on December 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

That was horrifying. Reading it felt like the capitalist money-makers are trying to infiltrate everything, make every human emotion, every creative endeavour into a business opportunity. Thank gods few of them have the attention span to keep it up.

And did anyone notice that all the literature mentioned was written by men? Guess women are not considered worthy of emulating in the business world. And honestly, I am not sure whether that is a good thing or a bad thing.
posted by Athanassiel at 5:00 PM on December 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Depressing and horrifying, all in one package. There's been some great research on empathy and reading fiction (eg Raymond Mar at York University) but this is like a funhouse inversion of the concept.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 5:43 PM on December 10, 2015

Ha! As someone with a writing background prepping for possible B-school, this was fascinating (though I wish they'd talked more to the person at the end).

I have noticed in my b-school explorations that there doesn't seem to be a lot course-wise that challenges the whole notion of business and capitalism to begin with. What happens if you teach b-school students that they're not the Centre of the world? What if you teach lit, case studies, activist writing that complicates business? What would a radical MBA look like?

(That said, I've noticed that a lot of radical types can be insufferable about anything vaguely tinged with money so I hesitate to fully espouse them as role models.)
posted by divabat at 8:01 PM on December 10, 2015 [2 favorites]