Somebody won’t be on the UofA’s Xmas card list
Posted by Tyler Kinch on November 21st, 2008
Letter to the editor (Edmonton Journal) from Philip Raworth, emeritus professor, University of Alberta School of Business:
What surprises me about the present economic crisis is not that it exists, but that it was so long in coming. For years I have been observing the blinkered education dished out in business schools, the behaviour of investors who manage to combine the greed of jackals with the timidity of sheep and the connivance of governments in the rise of a frantic pursuit of profit that was never sustainable.
For me, the real villains of the piece are the business schools. In the early days of capitalism, most businesses were controlled by the people who created them. Most were not particularly enlightened employers, with some prominent exceptions, but neither were they possessed by an insatiable hunger continually to increase their profits. If they made the five per cent or 10 per cent profit each year, that procured them a good standard of living; they were content.
Then, most larger companies became investor-owned and controlled, and with this came the business schools to provide them with the young Turks to run their businesses. Most graduates of business schools have never created anything, could never create anything.
They are the bureaucrats of business, schooled in a worship of profit, a cringing fear of investors, marketing gimmicks to induce superfluous consumption, financial manipulations and strategic planning based solely on efficiency and profit.
These unimaginative products of a soulless education have one use only, that is to assuage the thirst for profit that has seen the rebirth of a new savage capitalism and which has driven us into this mess.
If the Alberta government wishes to contribute to solving our present crisis, they could do no better than shutting down all the schools of business in the province.
Philip Raworth, emeritus professor, University of Alberta School of Business