I saw this coming but harbored secret hopes that the Booth
School of Business and the Becker Friedman Center at The University of Chicago
could resist, but alas their resolve is collapsing. From what I can gather, only tiny Hillsdale
College has been able to stand firm and not kneel before the BLM forces.
As a prelude, a few years ago, I attended a program at the
Becker Friedman Institute, chaired by then director John List to hear economist
Casey Mulligan speak. In his
introductory remarks, List spoke about building the pipeline for Chicago, how
it is attempting to recruit top notch faculty, and how difficult it is to hold
on to talent as other schools constantly attempt to poach Chicago faculty. I noted then that I heard only words of
“academic excellence,” “intellectual rigor,” “creativity” and the like. List uttered not one word about “diversity”
and “inclusiveness.” But that was then and this is now.
Last week, Dean of the Booth School of Business Madhav Rajan
sent out a blast email to alumni with the subject line “Strengthening Diversity
and Inclusion at Booth” (reprinted below).
In it, Rajan outlines a major push purportedly to improve
“diversity and inclusion” at Booth.
Rajan, who hails from India (I’m never sure where Indians fit into Woke
culture of whites versus brown and black people) dispatches a missive that
could have come from any progressive liberal arts college in the country. Booth is consistently ranked among the top 5
business schools in the country and is known for its top flight economists, and
quantitative rigor, yet Rajan felt compelled to worship the diversity gods in a
very pedestrian and ordinary way.
Here are my responses to Rajan’s missive:
-
Rajan is compelled to invoke George Floyd in his
opening paragraph. While Floyd’s death
sparked a great deal of unrest and it appears to have been a case of terrible
police brutality, that single incident should not be sufficient to require a
wholesale shift of focus of the school. Among
other things, Floyd’s death has not yet been adjudicated, the facts have not
been fully heard (Floyd had fentanyl in his system) and there is not a shred of
solid evidence to show that his death was racially motivated, or even whether
he was killed by the officer. To be clear, Mr. Floyd himself was
a very bad man—so bad, in fact, that society determined that he had to be
removed from it for five years—a long sentence.
It does not appear that Mr. Floyd hadn’t learned his lesson and was not
very repentant as he was still engaged in illegal activity. So to invoke George Floyd as an
impetus for a major initiative at a business school seems misplaced, to say the
least.
-
Rajan blindly accepts the term “inclusion.” What
does that term mean, exactly? For its
entire history, the Booth School of Business stood for something quite the
opposite—it was “exclusive.” This is a
school with Nobel Prize winners on its faculty. It is an intellectually ELITE school. It boasted average GMAT scores of 730 or
better, which is in the 95th percentile.
Additionally, Booth’s emphasis on mathematical ability will skew
admissions even further. The Booth
School is, and should be, exclusive, not inclusive. It screens out applicants that do not have
the quantitative aptitude to handle the rigor of its curriculum. Its faculty is even more elite, and its
stated goal has been to attract and retain faculty members that are the
equivalent of academic Olympic athletes, regardless of skin color.
Astonishingly, as part of his
“diversity and inclusiveness” push, Rajan proposes to include “unconscious bias
training.” Much has been written about
the ineffectiveness of such training in corporate America. There is no definitive empirical evidence
that it does anything much. The very institution
most known for its ability to empirically test hypotheses now proposes to
include mandatory training that its own management that has no quantifiable effectiveness. It's almost as if Rajan had Ta-Nehisi Coates as an advisor.
-
Most importantly, minorities (Asians, Blacks,
Hispanics, Native Americans) make up 27%
of the student body at Chicago Booth. The latest census shows that such minorities
make up 30% of the U.S. population.
Unless I’m missing the point, it looks like the Booth School of Business
is awful darn close to reflecting the general population in its student body. Rajan appears to be investing an awful lot of
time and resources into a problem that does not seem to exist. The numbers don’t break out percentages among
minority groups, and if Rajan is focused on African Americans, he needs to say
that. Otherwise, the numbers don’t
support his assertion.
Dean Rajan’s email is troubling on a number of fronts. This is a school that relentlessly challenges
its students to identify and solve the right problem and utilize quantitative
tools to marshal resources and to measure progress. Yet, Rajan puts forward scant evidence that the
Booth School has fallen flat in its minority representation. Moreover, if not enough minorities
(especially African Americans) have the quantitative skills to perform at
Booth, that is not a problem Rajan can solve.
Those skills are acquired much earlier in life. By the time someone is 21 or older, it’s too
late. That is the job of primary,
secondary and universities to tackle, and not a graduate school.
The leader of one of the top business schools in the country
misidentifies a problem, allocates scarce resources to solving it, proposes
steps that are known to be ineffective, and doesn’t appropriately measure any
of it. That’s all the elements of poor
management. Rajan missed an opportunity to bring a uniquely Chicago approach and voice to the conversation and instead opted to send a message that could have been written by any other college president or dean.
________________________________________________________________________
| Dear Chicago
Booth Community, As you may have seen, the University of Chicago recently announced its plans to address Diversity and Inclusion across the university, in response to recent events including the killing of George Floyd. Chicago Booth welcomes these steps and reaffirms the school’s unwavering commitment to diversity and inclusion, and rejection of racism. Over the past several weeks, I and my senior leadership team have been in conversation with many in our community of students, alumni, faculty, and staff to evaluate and strengthen our work to address racism and create positive change across Chicago Booth. I am thankful to those of you who lifted your voices and demonstrated your deep concern for your school and community. Inspired by the discussions with our full- and part-time MBA community, this week we shared with the students our initial Plan of Action to strengthen diversity and inclusion at Booth. These near- and long-term steps cover a broad range of areas, including student admissions, curriculum, faculty and staff, communications, employer relations, and engagement. The important work articulated in the plan is currently under way, but this is just the first step. We continue to consider ways we can do more and measure our progress going forward. We recognize that diversity and inclusion is a dynamic issue that affects people in different ways, and we understand this will be experienced differently among members of our global community. While we developed this plan with input from our MBA students, these conversations are also taking place across various facets of the school. I would like to express my gratitude to our MBA students, and in particular the students of the African American MBA Association and our student leaders, for sharing their stories, feedback, and ideas to effect meaningful change. Our students’ honesty, passion, and commitment to seeing the school excel have been and will continue to be crucial to our success in making Booth a more diverse and inclusive institution and community. Best wishes, Madhav |
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