Nevertheless, the school still has no separate course. Heskett says the school prefers to treat ethics as it comes up in class and calls attention to a recent poll of students showing that they sense an increase, throughout the school, of concentration on ethical issues. He feels that the students who most need training in ethics are the ones who are not interested enough to take a full course in the subject.

Bok also calls in his report for increased integration of teaching with research at the school. He says faculty members may do better to spend more time researching new fields and less time in painstaking preparation of case materials.

Business faculty say the case method forces research into the kinds of practical problems their school wants to teach. "The case method is a method of research--Bok's report is somewhat like telling a chemist not to do any work in a laboratory, just to think up ideas," Wickham Skinner, Robinson Professor of Business Administration, says. "The business world is our laboratory."

Bok says he chose this year to analyze the B-School because next year he must appoint a new dean, and he wanted a chance to familiarize himself with the B-School faculty and programs. The current dean, Lawrence E. Fouraker, will leave his post some time next year. Bok says his report is not meant to be critical of Fouraker, but neither he nor Fouraker will give reasons for the dean's departure. Fouraker, in fact, has no comment at all on any of Bok's criticism.

The shadow of Stanford's business school looming large over Harvard's prestige may also have motivated Bok's report. MBA magazine has granted Stanford a higher academic rating than Harvard in its last two polls on business school quality. Although such polls always raise doubts, some of Bok's suggestions for the B-School--especially his eagerness for the school to do more research--hint that Bok may want Harvard to move a few degrees away from its management-training emphasis toward Stanford's academic research approach. Although Stanford's reputation for academic excellence has improved in recent years, Harvard students still insist Harvard's degree has greater market value

Business school faculty and administrators may end up simply filing Bok's report under miscellaneous correspondence and forgetting about it. They feel their recent curriculum reform constituted enough change for a while, and students seem to agree. B-school people don't even like to talk much about Bok's report. Instead, they present an unfrazzled and unrevealing front to the world, while inside students continue to prepare as before for the day when they will "take charge and run something."