With all due respect, why don’t we get rid of business schools?

The Chronicle has a challenging proposition: Business Schools Have No Business in the University. The author makes a good case, and I agree with him. Business schools are incoherent, have no consistent curriculum, and I suspect that even most of their graduates would agree that the skills to succeed in business are ones you learn in real world practice. The sole reasons they exist are to give rich people a certificate of intellectual accomplishment — a kind of Wizard of Oz game — and to give them a place to send their kids that aren’t too challenging and give them the pretense that they’re fit to step into Mom or Dad’s shoes. There’s no better example of this function than our president.

Unable to truly create a profession of business, business schools more often function as finishing schools for the new junior executive. The finishing-school role that business schools have always played can be summarized this way: Donald J. Trump went to Wharton.

Depending on your point of view you are either nodding your head in affirmation or crying out “cheap shot!” So let me hasten to say that it is entirely unfair to blame Wharton for Trump’s pathological narcissism or his gargantuan vulgarity. After all, Newt Gingrich received a Ph.D. in history, and I don’t want the historical profession to be blamed for him.

And yet Trump exemplifies exactly the kind of man for whom business school was invented. Deeply and transparently insecure, Trump has reminded his supporters over and over that he went to Wharton and that that means he’s really, bigly smart. Trump sees his Wharton education as giving him social status and intellectual credibility. At the turn of the 20th century, one function of the new business schools was to give the sons of the new industrial titans a respectable patina, to launder the wealth they had received from their fathers by scrubbing it with a college degree. And so it is for Trump.

But there are reasons to keep them around.

  • Money. Money money money money money. Money money.

    The business school at the University of Chicago became the Booth Chicago School of Business after David Booth dropped a whopping $300 million to have his name emblazoned on the building, and that was in 2008, while the rest of the country was reeling.

  • To be fair, I think vocational programs should get more respect, and business school really is a kind of vocational certification program. I think the students would be of greater use to society if they learned welding, but we have to give them choices. It can’t hurt if a young man or woman graduates with some evidence that they’ve learned some of the skills needed to be a middle manager.

  • Capitalism must have its own metrics to institutionalize their practices, and maybe business schools, if they had the competence to do so, could act as bottleneck to regulate the proliferation of pointless management personnel. It would also be so sweet if they actually forced their graduates to learn some ethics. But now I’m wandering off into fantasy land.

Most of those reasons are hypothetical, though. As the article concludes, business schools are failures.

It is hard to shake the conclusion that business schools have largely failed — even on their own terms, much less on other, broader social ones. For all their bold talk about training tomorrow’s business leaders, as institutions they have largely been followers. “In reviewing the course of American business education over the past fifty years,” wrote one observer, “one is struck by its almost fad-like quality.” That was in 1957. Despite their repeated emphasis on innovation and “outside the box thinking” business schools exhibit a remarkable conformity and sameness. Don’t take my word for it. That Porter and McKibbin study from 1988 found “a distressing tendency for schools to avoid the risk of being different … A ‘cookie cutter mentality’ does not seem to be too strong a term to describe the situation we encountered in a number of schools.” Finally, while honest people can disagree over whether American business is better off for having business schools, they have provided scant evidence that they have done much to transform business into something more noble than mere money-making. Indeed, by the late 20th century, they stopped pretending they could.

Well, failures except for the money part. Let’s get more rich business people to dump big wads of cash on universities. It’s just too bad they too often earmark the money for useless business schools.

Marketing is not science

I’ve written about Brian Wansink before, but here you go, a grand summary of the bad science at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab. They’ve gone over an archive of emails, and it’s worse than I ever imagined: they’ve just been churning over crappy studies, looking for garbage associations that will go “viral”. It’s embarrassingly awful.

“That’s p-hacking on steroids,” said Kristin Sainani, an associate professor of health research and policy at Stanford University. “They’re running every possible combination of variables, essentially, to see if anything will come up significant.”

In a conversation about another study in August 2015, Wansink mentioned a series of experiments that “were chasing interactions that were hard to find.” He apparently hoped that they would all arrive at the same conclusion, which is “bad science,” said Susan Wei, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Minnesota.

“It does very much seem like this Brian Wansink investigator is a consistent and repeated offender of statistics,” Wei added. “He’s so brazen about it, I can’t tell if he’s just bad at statistical thinking, or he knows that what he’s doing is scientifically unsound but he goes ahead anyway.”

Everything they do in that lab is stuff I was told way back in the beginning of my career was bad. They do “experiments” without a prior hypothesis — they’re just fishing out of pool of lots of meaningless numbers that they generate by collecting observations of shitloads of variables. Then they crunch away at it until they find a correlation that they can build a paper around, and shop the paper around until it finds a journal with low enough standards to publish it.

In the first year biology class I’m teaching right now, I have a lecture or two at the end of the term on bioethics. This is going to be the case study we’ll go over this year. I’m wondering what’s wrong with Wansink’s education that he never learned that you don’t get to do any of this, since he’s oblivious to his sins.

I also have to point out (probably won’t in class, though) that the real problem here is that Wansink hasn’t been doing science — he’s been doing marketing, and marketing is an evil of capitalism. Please keep your capitalism out of our science, OK?

By the way, this was on Buzzfeed, and Buzzfeed gets a bad rap. I know there’s a big pile of capitalism tainting Buzzfeed, too, which has had more of a reputation for click-baity quizzes and pop news, but their news division is actually pretty good — it’s like a circus that opened a serious news outlet and hired real reporters to staff it, unlike some of the news networks that hired clowns to read the news at you. Virginia Hughes is the science editor there, and she’s serious and smart and is part of a good team that has been doing some exemplary reporting.

I’m going to Scandinavia for a few months!

At least, I wish it were so — Turning Point USA thinks it would be a great comeuppance for us to spend a few months in a country with a political system we like.

TPUSA must believe their propaganda that every other country is a hellhole compared to the US to even think this argument works. Kinda like this ignoramus:

Right-wingers seem to know nothing about history, or economics, or politics, or science, either.

And now for some good news

Here’s what I’ve been listening to today. I think Janelle Monae is what you’d get if Prince were resurrected as a woman.

I like this one even better. I want to visit that club, even though I fear I would not survive the experience.

Genius. But I have to wait until 27 April for the whole album to drop, which is cruel.

Skeptic and atheist organizations suffer a failure of leadership

In a total coincidence, I woke up this morning and notice a box of old magazines by the bedside that my wife was planning to throw out, and on the very top was the back cover of Free Inquiry, with this advertisement:

And then, this morning, this article appears: Science Organizations Cancel Lawrence Krauss Events After Sexual Harassment Allegations. Like lightning, within days of the big, thoroughly-sourced article documenting Krauss’s shenanigans, the speaking engagements are sublimating away, leaving nothing but a greasy smear on floor of his reputation. He’s lost the odd event with Sam Harris last night, NECSS has announced that they don’t plan to invite him to future events, MIT cancelled an event, the American Physical Society has dropped him from their annual meeting — he has been Harvey Weinsteined practically overnight.

There are a few exceptions. That infamous cruise:

The BuzzFeed piece also cites an alleged incident in 2011 involving Krauss that I previously detailed in a 2013 post I wrote for the Heresy Club, a now-defunct blog network of young writers in the skeptic community. The blog post, which was removed shortly after its publication following legal threats from Krauss, described a 2011 incident in which Krauss allegedly propositioned a woman to engage in a threesome with himself and another woman (the request was reportedly turned down). The woman was at the time a guest on a cruise sponsored by the Center for Inquiry, where Krauss was one of the featured speakers. I also wrote in my 2013 blog post—and the BuzzFeed article reiterates—that at least one CFI employee implored the then-president of CFI, Ron Lindsay, to not invite Krauss on a planned 2014 cruise, citing the “report of unwanted sexual attention” she had received from the woman and other past offensive behavior. The CFI nevertheless invited him.

CFI has known about these problems as long or longer than other organizations. Nevertheless, CFI has long supported him.

Once, Krauss was barred from making contact with an undergraduate student by his university or from entering the campus without permission, following her harassment complaint, the BuzzFeed article reports. In another instance, the article says, a prominent research institute placed Krauss on its do-not-invite list, following a complaint made during a 2009 event where he guest-spoke. The article also reported that another prominent secular and skeptical organization, the Center for Inquiry (CFI), continued to invite Krauss to events even after having been made aware of several allegations against him and CFI employees requesting that he not attend in light of them.

Universities, like Case Western Reserve, apparently dealt with him effectively after due process (universities are notoriously slow at handling these internal matters). Professional scientific organizations cut him off with remarkable swiftness. CFI, on the other hand, is still struggling to figure out how to cope at least 7 years after the problem first raised its ugly head. The Center for Inquiry doesn’t even have a comment on the matter on their website; neither does the Richard Dawkins Foundation, despite their long association with him.

It’s dismaying that the skeptical/atheist organizations still have their heads stuck up their butts while the rest of the world passes them by. It’s especially troubling because I know there are good people at CFI who are seething about all this, but management has them locked down.

Time for some Secular Social Justice

I’ve managed to eke out enough frequent flyer miles that I can afford to fly off to Secular Social Justice on 7 April. Also, as usual, all it takes is reading a little Sikivu Hutchinson to get me fired up for it.

In April, the American Humanist Association is sponsoring the semi-annual Secular Social Justice (SSJ) conference in Washington, D.C. This first of its kind conference is designed to spotlight the intersectional, anti-racist organizing, activism and cultural work of secular people of color. When my comrade Donald Wright (founder of the National Day of Solidarity for Black Non-Believers) and I organized the first SSJ conference two years ago at Rice University in Houston, non-believers of color were struggling with the very same visibility and platform issues that they grapple with today. The majority often navigate between a white mainstream atheist world that has been hostile to intersectionality, black feminism and people of color, and socially conservative religious communities of color that view atheism as inauthentically black or tantamount to devil worship.

Sincere Kirabo, lead organizer for this year’s SSJ conference notes that SSJ “was developed as a direct response to pervasive complacency within the secular community that considers focus on matters of social justice issues unnecessary or a “distraction.” Countering that view, the conference will feature speakers and presenters from racial justice, law, public policy, queer, trans and immigrant rights activism, educational equity and humanist activism.

Finally, SSJ also speaks to a critical leadership vacuum in the mainstream atheist, humanist and secular movements. There are currently few to no people of color in executive management positions in major secular organizations (i.e., the Center for Inquiry, Secular Student Alliance, American Humanist Association, etc.). As a result, it is precisely because of anti-atheist religious bigotry, white atheist racism and the lack of culturally responsive secular organizations that the vast majority of non-believers of color do not feel comfortable openly identifying as atheist. And, until this shifts, the much-ballyhooed rise of the nones will only be a footnote for segregated communities of color.

This is the direction movement atheism has to take if it wants to survive and be meaningful. If I can help in any way, that’s where I want to make my contributions.

Now, one other little thing: the conference is taking place at All-Souls Unitarian Church, but does anyone know if there is an associated hotel for the event? Otherwise, I’m just going to book the nearest, cheapest hotel in the area.

I guess it’ll be another IMDB credit for me

I was informed yesterday that I am the ☆STAR☆ of yet another movie, a movie that I was not told about and just sort of stumbled into. I’m losing all respect for movie celebrities, though: apparently, the way a movie star works is to have some guy with a camera record you talking for a bit, and then they all go away, and you don’t even think about it for five years, and then suddenly this thing is available online and you see it and say “Oh crap, I was in that piece of shit?” and you never get paid. I’m beginning to wonder how those other movie stars can afford their beach houses in Malibu.

So here, you can watch my fabulous movie, Origins of the Universe: The Great Debate on Amazon Prime.

Oh, yeah, they also misspell my name, because of course they always do.

You don’t really want to watch it.

As I was watching it, I remembered the circumstances. I think it was a conference in Winnipeg; this guy asked me nicely if I’d answer some questions on camera, and I said sure, so I end up in this oddly lit hotel room with a stranger (I hate how that happens) and he starts firing questions at me, for about an hour. I had no idea it was a debate, but I guess that after the fact, it was. And then I literally went away and completely forgot about it.

The interviewer, Todd Cantelon, then spliced me in with other footage of such luminaries as Ken Ham and Terry Mortenson and David Menton and Jason Lisle and Georgia Purdom and PZ Meyers (oh, wait, that was me). It’s weird to be retroactively ganged up on, but I’m unconcerned, they were all idiots.

There’s also a woman named Mary P. Winsor who was interviewed, so I wasn’t alone on my side. She’s a historian of biology, and has written criticisms of Mayr’s claims about pre-Darwinian essentialism. I don’t know much about her work, but if she’s been opposing some of the ahistorical BS that Ernst Mayr spent a long lifetime injecting into the discourse, she and I are on the same side.

Anyway, it’s a long boring set of spliced-together clips of me saying a sentence or two, then Ken Ham babbling out his fallacious canned spiel about “observational science” and then more creationists talking, then another sentence or two by me or Mary Winsor followed by more nonsense from creationists.

Also, to spice it up, the creationists were recorded at the Creation “Museum” in some place where dinosaur roars and honks occasionally drown them out. Todd Cantelon pretends to be a moderator, but all of his segments were filmed in some spectacular red rock canyon somewhere. It’s kind of unfair that all I got was a grey Winnipeg hotel room.