Walking Across the Water

PHILIP SCHORSH, son of a German tycoon, hippie-radical, deportee from the United States, Harvard Business School student, and cause celebre, was one of the more bizarre luminaries in the Harvard firmament a couple of years back. A doctoral candidate given the boot for not even beginning his thesis, Schorsh struck back by claiming to be writing a thesis on what was wrong with the Harvard Business School.

Schorsh never wrote the thing of course, but Peter Cohen, an MBA who passed through the Business School more peacefully and more successfully, has written a book The Gospel According to the Harvard Business School: The Education of American's Managerial Elite: The Case of Section B, about what he thinks is wrong with the school. Unfortunately, the book is as poor as the title is long.

Which is too bad, since the Business School is an often neglected and very intriguing institution. Harvard alumni are notorious for succeeding in their chosen professions, and B-school alumni are especially notorious. Slightly under one tenth of the companies on the Fortune 500 list of the largest corporations in the country are run by B-school graduates, and other graduates litter the landscape in other economic interstices where they obtain wealth and exercise power, even if they do not attract fame. The B-school supposedly has a very viable and active old boys network--its graduates look out for each other. As business schools go, Harvard's has the best reputation and is the most influential in the country.

So the B-school deserves attention, more than it gets. But it should not be subjected to the kind of misdirected attention Peter Cohen bestows on it. The Gospel... is plagued with problems of writing, problems of reporting, problems with the method of presentation, and problems of perspective.

THE PROBLEMS with the writing are the most persistent and obvious. Exactly who Cohen is writing for is unclear. He claims his audience includes "students today," for me, in other words. Perhaps, but I do not react very well to passages like:

A change in weather has come with the suddeness of a thunderstorm, whipping thick gusts of rain into the trees. The leaves that seemed to stay up there forever are finally beginning to fall...

It was as if the weather had decided to dramatize the change that has come over A1 Terner's life since he entered the Business School; the feeling of anguish that wrenches his insides every time he crosses the bridge over the Charles.

I don't know that I've ever really thought of Boston that way. It has usually seemed pretty bad, but not so bad as this prose.

But the writing becomes more objectionable when Cohen moves onto topics somewhat more sensitive than the weather. Examining a professor's suicide, he calls the chapter "An Unexpected End" (which is itself mildly obnoxious) and then goes on to write:

It is peculiar how the soul protects the thin flame of consciousness against the violent gusts of emotions. How in moments of great triumph and tragedy alike, it shuts and bolts its windows, keeping the littler flame in stillest darkness with nothing but a distant echo of the agitation outside.

And so it was today, as this shot resounded through Aldrich 108. No more than a faint "thump" could be heard in the shuttered, locked confines of our minds.

Leaving aside the problem that earlier in the book Cohen has disclosed that Aldrich 108 has no windows to shut and bolt, this just does not make it as well-handled prose. Perhaps reading all those cases that business school students must read (they are expected in the first year of the MBA program to read three cases or so a night, each case presenting a particular management situation or problem) has prevented Cohen from mastering a more expressive English prose style.

The problems with the writing are naturally accompanied by problems of the organization and presentation in the book. This is supposed to be a case study on how things happen at the Business School. But as a case study it focuses on the activities of one group of people who were there three years ago, carrying induction to an idiotic extreme. This focus on a single case unfortunately leads him into a basic error--into presenting as current the reactions of people in 1969 to a grading system that has since been abolished.

Cohen has a persistent gimmick--permitting fellow students to speak verbatim in his pages--that presents more problems in the book's organization. Without any real feel for the speakers (he gives no meaningful background on most of them) the importance of these sometimes blank little speeches is unclear. If they are not padding, they do not add much to the book either.

SOMEHOW, COHEN'S central thesis--unfortunately--does manage to come through. The thesis is, very simply, at about the level of sophistication that Cohen presents it, that too much competition is a bad thing and that the Business School fosters too much competition.

Whatever the merits of this thesis, it is hardly an original one, and Cohen's failure to refine it is consequently serious. Cohen is a Harvard MBA, much as the school may like to forget it after this mistake of a book, and as such he may well be a living monument to one of the major problems the Business School faces--its curriculum has a balance between theory and practice different from the rest of the university's and therefore its graduates, however adept at management, may not be so good at writing what should be imaginative sociological studies. Cohen as an MBA is out of his element when he tries to write even an analysis of his own environment.

But back to the point about competition. His enthusiasm for this fascinating insight precludes his discussing one of the most interesting phenomenon of the Business School--the study groups all first-year students become involved in. At the Harvard Business School, future business cutthroats get together to save each other's skins, and study cooperatively, to prepare each other for the following day's classes. The Law School has similar study groups, though they have not been regularized the way they have been across the river. The College has nothing like them, of course--not on a regular basis, nor does the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. But at the Business School these are very important parts of people's education, and they are cooperative enterprises. Cohen, in his eagerness to make points about the competitiveness of business types generally, and about the Business School's general acceptance of the prevailing economic and social order, fails to pay these anomalies the attention they deserve.

BUT THEN COHEN does not pay attention to a number of things he ought to. His is largely a problem of perspective. Students in institutions are probably not the best people to write serious studies of the institutions as sociological phenomena. Too caught up with what they themselves do, they suffer from a tendency to turn themselves and their friends into case studies, into role models, or even into interesting people, which they are not. The Gospel According to The Harvard Business School, dealing with the Harvard Business School from September 1968 to June 1970 is really nothing more than a strike book, an inferior version of Push Comes to Shove (as if Kelman's book were not bad enough), too out of date, even more pretentious, and outrageously overpriced--but maybe he learned something from the Business School.