Get Herald RSSThe University recently took the first steps toward establishing a partnership with the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid, a business-oriented Spanish university. The Herald reported last week that the University will plan exchanges with the Instituto de Empresa that might eventually include study abroad opportunities. We view this collaboration as a welcome development in the University's internationalization efforts, and a valuable chance to reexamine business education at Brown.
Due to restrictive language in the University's charter, Brown is one of only two members of the Ivy League without a graduate school in business. Brown still offers a handful of business-related courses in the engineering department and the Commerce, Organizations and Entrepreneurship concentration. These classes seem to clash with Brown's academic philosophy.
Like most reputable institutions of higher learning, Brown does not offer a pre-law concentration. The reasons are many: Pre-professional courses of study conflict with a liberal arts education, colleges cannot teach the subject as well as law schools and pre-law students do not have an advantage in graduate school admissions. The same considerations apply to business programs at the undergraduate level. We're especially concerned about the study of management, entrepreneurship, innovation, commerce and related topics at Brown because there is no organized discipline or robust tradition of scholarship in these areas.
We question the rigor of business-related programs relative to other courses of study at Brown. For example, the "Organizational Studies" and "Entrepreneurship and Technology Management" tracks in COE allow concentrators to fulfill the statistics requirement in any of seven different fields, including the Departments of Education and Psychology. Entrepreneurial courses, in engineering and more broadly, contrast with the rest of the curriculum. According to the Department of Engineering's Web site, these classes are largely intended to prepare science and engineering students for careers at start-up companies. We fear that other students who only enroll in "engineering-lite" courses and their fluffy COE counterparts will graduate with some basic training in marketing but without anything marketable.
Given the University's shortcomings in business education and the field's limitations as an undergraduate academic discipline, we strongly encourage administrators to aggressively pursue collaboration with the Instituto de Empresa. Short of a dramatic transformation of Brown's existing program, the best solution may be to outsource business education altogether.
Editorials are written by The Herald's editorial page board. Send comments to editorials@browndailyherald.com.
