Through its collaboration with the Law School, the course addresses the heavy regulation of the industry, an issue that the two professors often differed on, Tufano and Jackson say.
Jon P. Swan, who took the class before graduating from HBS last year, says he feels like he has benefitted from the course. One of his favorite cases was about a couple with a sub-prime mortgage losing their home.
“What was neat was picking up the Wall Street Journal everyday and finding something directly related to what we were doing in class,” Swan says.
'TWEAKS'
The criticism and curricular changes are not limited to Harvard Business School. Several elite business schools from around the country are making “tweaks” similar to those at HBS, with individual faculty members taking the lead.
At the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, students will be able to take the new course “The Analytics of Financial Crises” as well as new courses on ethics and social responsibility. Yale School of Management has added a first-year core curriculum course entitled “The Global Macroeconomy,” as well as several electives.
“Our approach has not been monolithic change from the top down. Tons of things are bubbling up in response” to the crisis,” says JoAnne Yates, deputy dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, which is considering implementing a required ethics course.
The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth has taken a more robust approach, with a full curricular review and the implementation of a core leadership course and a seminar in critical analysis, according to an e-mail from Tuck Dean Paul Danos.
“Here we are aiming at honing an open and questioning mind, that is eager to probe and challenge—actions that were sorely lacking by certain officials and regulators in the financial markets.” Danos says.
Still, Broughton remains critical of the school’s response in favor of what he sees as a need for more comprehensive change.
“Anyone who doesn’t live within a mile of the Charles River sees the problem with a business school philosophy that has harmed a lot of people,” Broughton says. “They’ll have to do more than offer a handful of electives to change that.”
—Staff writer William N. White can be reached at wwhite@fas.harvard.edu.