She vowed that BusinessWeek will use “other ways” to contact HBS students for the magazine’s survey, but she declined to specify further.

“There are plenty of people within the school who have contacted us to offer their assistance,” she added. “It’s possible that we could end up surveying the entire HBS class of 2004—highly possible.”

According to business school admissions consultant Sanford Kreisberg, “any survey which put Harvard and Wharton out of the top five would be laughed at.”

“BusinessWeek will get the data they need to have Harvard and Wharton in the top five one way or another,” Kreisberg wrote in an e-mail.

CREATING A ‘CARTEL’?

Lampe said Harvard—swamped with requests for information from magazines seeking to compile rankings—is working with other members of the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC) to generate “standardized metrics for business school programs,” which will be available to the public this fall.

He said magazines frequently develop rankings based on inconsistent criteria and unaudited data. One HBS staff member devotes half her time to answering information requests from publications formulating rankings, Lampe said.

“There’s getting to be so many [rankings] with so many different questions and it’s not all that clear if many of these questions are all that meaningful,” Lampe said.

But BusinessWeek, in an editorial in its current issue, assailed the GMAC initiative as a “cartel-like arrangement.”

The magazine criticized the GMAC plan for not including any rankings of schools or incorporating student and alumni feedback.

BusinessWeek’s survey also includes a questionnaire filled out by school administrators, which Merritt noted is “the most time-consuming element of all of this.” Lampe said HBS would still cooperate with BusinessWeek on the school questionnaire.

He added that HBS will continue to conduct its own surveys of student opinion, which he described as “more rigorous” than the BusinessWeek questions.

But Watkins, who will leave the HBS faculty at the end of this semester, noted that the school did not consult students and alumni in its decision to scale back cooperation with BusinessWeek.

Lampe said most students learned of the change last Monday, when the school officially announced its policy change. A select group of student leaders was informed before the weekend, Lampe said.

Watkins said HBS should consider students and alumni as “customers.”

“What would you say to a business that was trying to avoid listening to its key customers because it didn’t want to hear what they had to say? I would tell them they were in a death spiral,” he said.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.