Get Herald RSSTo the Editor:
As student leaders involved with entrepreneurship education at Brown, we are writing in response to last week's ill-informed and hypocritical editorial ("We're in business," Feb. 23). The editorial criticizes the Commerce, Organizations and Entrepreneurship program for being pre-professional, (i.e. preparing students for work in a particular field through practical instruction), yet also criticizes COE for not preparing students for professional life. This paradoxical attack suggests that the editors may have used COE as a vehicle for expressing an anti-business bias, rather than legitimately evaluating the concentration as an academic program.
The primary aim of COE is to study organizations and entrepreneurship from a multidisciplinary perspective. Students are exposed to analytical frameworks that are well grounded in the disciplines of economics, organizational studies and technology management. Skills that students can elect to study are indeed practical, but no more so than some courses in Public Policy or International Relations, for example. If The Herald questions whether COE teaches "marketable skills," then the career successes of COE graduates now in the Brookings Institute, Capital One, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Northwestern Mutual, Teach for America and Turner Construction speak for themselves.
A strong line of attack in the editorial is COE's purported lack of rigor. Though the difficulty of any concentration at Brown is ultimately of the student's choosing, COE's structure is just as strenuous, if not more, than many concentrations, requiring 14 to 17 courses depending upon the track. In terms of content, courses in economics focus on finance, an area of investigation made all the more important by recent world events; courses in sociology focus on organizational theory, an area of study attracting far more research than any other in management; courses in technology management focus on the process of transforming ideas into opportunities, and, deliberately, opportunities into commercial realities. These courses are complemented with at least four additional classes in the traditional hard sciences.
Students are attracted to this interdisciplinary concentration. They know that today's world demands a broad set of intellectual skills. Furthermore, many things are happening under the COE umbrella outside the classroom, from events such as last week's Entrepreneurship Program Forum, which was attended by over 200 students, faculty and alumni and watched online by more than 11,000 people, to an undergraduate summer internship in India, student-faculty events organized by its DUG and a new mentorship initiative under the aegis of the Brown Women in Business student group.
Contrary to the derogatory tone of Monday's editorial, COE helps students to master one of the hardest intellectual challenges: integrating cutting-edge ideas across three very different disciplines. This ability to synthesize multiple perspectives is not only central to Brown's mission; it is also indispensable to success in business, public service and scholarship alike.
Ian Spector '09 Drew Janes '09 Entrepreneurship Program Co-Presidents March 4
is a member of the 
