According to professors at other business schools, the overall volume of cases produced each year has usually been sufficient to provide new material for their courses. Where some have found problems, however, is in the breadth of the cases' subject matter.

Few Cases on Ethics, Minorities

Cases which deal specifically with problems in business ethics, or those featuring women and minorities as subjects, for example, are often in short supply. While in most areas Harvard is "always turning cases out," says Ciulla, ethics cases, as well as those dealing with certain other specialized areas, are few, and professors often write their own in order to make new material available.

Kuhn, who teaches business ethics courses at Columbia, says he writes most of his own cases, and uses the B-School's "only if I'm desperate and can't come up with any of my own. It's not that I think Harvard's are poor, but they just don't fit my needs."

"I did a big survey of Harvard cases and was quite disappointed," said Kuhn. "Harvard's cases," he says, "too much revolve around personal ethics, rather than systemic ethics"--they study the transgressions made by individuals rather than how these are caused by the faults of the business world itself-"and I think that's a very serious weakness."

"Most of the last new ethics cases I've seen were mine," says Ciulla. "We need more ethics cases, and we need them on women, and we need them on Blacks. There are also no international cases worth anything." When Ciulla needs cases on international business, she says, she writes them with her foreign students.

According to Andrews, however, the absence of women and minorities from most case studies only reflects the problem of their absence in the actual business world. Since the cases describe actual situations, the presence of women and minorities in business cannot be fabricated. Professors say a concerted effort is made to include them wherever possible.

"There is certainly an effort now on the part of the case collection to follow the opportunity [to profile women or minorities in business] whenever it is available. It's a question of development and evolution. [Case researchers] would go to a company run by a woman before one run by a man. The imbalance needs to be corrected."

While some observers find the case method regimented, and some charge that important groups and topics are commonly neglected, critics are not likely to outnumber proponents anytime soon. For all its faults, the system has maintained decades of popularity with both professors and students at the B-School. Although virtually no other business schools in the country have introduced the same system, the powers that be across the River have decided that it works. The venerable case study method has today become almost as much of an institution as the school itself.