NYT Article on Gender and Class at Havard Business School Inspires Admissions Rule Suggestion

On Sunday the New York Times ran an article that was both inspiring and chilling.  Bottom line — energetic intervention by the administration almost completely eliminated the prior huge grade gap between men and women.  The chilling context, however, is a very depressing of a money soaked, class divided, status oriented and ambition-to-the-point-of-nihilism environment.  Not a place I would ever want my grandchildren to go — although they are of course free to make their own bad decisions. Tonight the Times is running a follow up article on the follow up, suggesting that many think that class rather than gender is the real issue, and showing the huge gap between the rich and the rest there.   I blog, therefore, to pass on this wonderful suggestion from the new piece, one that law schools should surely adopt. To help bring the school's culture back down to earth, Thomas J. Peters, a co-author of "In Search of Excellence" who has spoken at the Harvard Business School and has been a frequent critic of business education, suggested that the school apply a simple admissions rule: anyone from an ultraprivileged background needs to have done something of significant social value to be admitted. "If you're 27 years old and you've been given a lot of money, that's plenty of time to have done something," he said, adding that he and many of his friends at Stanford Business School in the 1970s were veterans. "Why can't that be in the admissions criteria flat out?" And, making a donation after deciding to go to law school does not count.

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