The case study method--now regarded as the academic trademark of the Harvard Business School--has become a fixture across the River since its curriculum-wide introduction in the 1920s.

But the B-School is virtually the only graduate business school in the country that has fully adopted this system, which stresses hands-on experience over abstract approaches. Using the case method, B-School students spend the majority of their class time examining recorded histories of actual workplace problems.

Proponents of the case study method say that the system's ability to involve students directly in the discussion and decision-making process is its foremost advantage. Students have the floor in most case discussions and direct their comments and questions towards each other as they work through a real business scenario. Professors remain in the background, instead of lecturing or controlling discussion.

"The case method is a crackling experience of involvement by both students and professors," says Walmsley University Professor C. Roland Christensen, widely regarded as the pioneer of the case study method at the B-School. The system, he says, represents "an important part of our total mission to do an excellent job of teaching."

"There is a great excitement generated by the participants in the analysis and solution of problems," says Kenneth R. Andrews, David Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus. "It's a stimulation that discussion provokes, as opposed to the glazing over of the eyes that occurs during some lectures."

Lack of Depth

But in business courses that involve more number-crunching than subjective policy decisions, enthusiasm for the case method begins to fade. Professors outside the B-School say that studying topics such as accounting and corporate finance requires an understanding of basic principles before exploring complex scenarios, adding that using case studies from the start allows for only a superficial treatment of the subject.

"Harvard's way is the way you'd learn a foreign language if you were just thrown into the streets of Paris--it's like Berlitz," says Roman L. Weil, professor of accounting and director of the Institute of Professional Accounting at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. "I don't teach Berlitz. It's not merely how to get along. We want to go deeper than that--we want our people to be leaders in their profession."

While B-School professors acknowledge that the case method is less ideal for teaching highly quantitative fields, they maintain that it still proves valuable even in such areas as accounting and finance. Since these topics do not lend themselves to the case method as easily as business policy does, professors at most business schools are often left to decide whether lectures, cases or a mixed approach will work best for their courses.

At Chicago's Graduate School of Business, says the director of its MBA program, the choice rests with the professor, and not with curriculum administrators. "The faculty are free to teach in any way they feel is best to convey their material," says Joanne Reott. "We use a variety of approaches. Especially in the beginning, we rely on more analytical or theoretical preesentations--the faculty introduces the basic principles. In the upper level classes, though, more case studies are brought in."

But at Harvard, cases are the rule, and they serve as the foundation for all courses. Although professors occasionally provide mini-lectures or summarize past classes, they must use case studies rather than lectures as the basic unit of instruction.

In addition, since all first-year students take the same courses at the same time, an effort to achieve parity between the 90-student sections results. Digressing too far from the planned curriculum means that one section will fall behind the others; and as a result, the flexibility of course material is minimal.

The rigidity of Harvard's use of the case method is not missed at other schools, such as the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and Chicago's B-School.

"Wharton's like total anarchy," says Joanne B. Ciulla, a Wharton lecturer specializing in ethics, who was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard's B-School. "At Harvard there's much more structure. There's the sense that you all have to get the same things done so that there's equitable teaching. That's tough--really tough."

"At Chicago," says Weil, "there is absolutely no attempt to coordinate the sections, whereas at Harvard it is absolutely forbidden to do anything different. There's a running joke that at the Harvard staff meetings, they don't just discuss what to talk about in class--they also tell you which blackboard to write it on."