The Fishbowl MBA

In one of our lunch breaks, we had as a guest speaker Mr. Nicholas Schreiber, former CEO of Tetrapak and currently on the advisory board of a number of top-tier business schools, including our own. During the presentation, I asked him what he thought the biggest challenge for business schools was. His reply was simple: “Getting good professors”.

It is an open secret that all business schools have professors who are bad teachers. A secret, because none of the schools will admit it in public, lest their valuable brands should be harmed. Yet an open secret, because the lack of good professors is a widely acknowledged problem to everybody who works within the field of management education. I have personally spoken to students from all over the world, from American top-tier schools like Harvard, Wharton and Columbia to mostly unknown Latin American business schools with really weird names. Everywhere, the story was the same; everybody had at some point experienced bad teaching at their school.

Why bad teachers exist

There is a number of reasons why bad teaching has not been eliminated even from the top business schools. The main one is also the simplest: there are not enough good professors in the world to cover the teaching needs of business schools. This means that business schools are in a constant battle to poach each other’s top professors, offering them either huge salaries or substantial benefits to win them over, or possibly attracting them because the school can offer a close and cooperative collegiate environment. (Schools like Harvard can obviously attract good professors because of their strong brand name, but then again, many professors prefer to work in a smaller school where the culture is more to their liking, where they can establish closer relationships with their colleagues, or where they can simply have more of a say in the way the school is run. To paraphrase the poet John Milton, professors may find it better to reign in Baltimore than to serve in Boston.) Sometimes, schools have little alternative but to hire professors that are not as good teachers as they should be.

It is also important to realise that in the eyes of the school, professors do a lot more than just teach students. It can a lot of sense for the school to hang onto a not-that-great teacher if he is a star researcher, or if his general reputation or business connections help the school secure either additional funding or provides them with corporate clients for their shorter, custom-built programs.

It may also be the case that a professor simply has a bad year, perhaps because of personal problems. The school is an organisation like any other, and will show a certain measure of loyalty towards its employees. Obviously, you don’t fire a professor that has served you well for decades because he suddenly has a bad year or two. You let him keep teaching in the hope that he gets over it, and suffer the inevitable student complaints for a few years.

A similar situation arises when the professors are new. Obviously, not all professors are great teachers from day one, and they need time in front of a class to get there. The school recognises this, and accepts that new professors get bad class reviews for the first year or two.

Of course, as an MBA student, you have little appreciation of these facts, not least because you have a significantly shorter time perspective than the school. What do you care whether a professor has personal issues, is a great research asset, or needs time to develop as a teacher? All you know is that you are not getting what you paid for. Believe me, it is supremely frustrating to sign up for a potentially fascinating class, only to discover that you learn little because the professor kerfuffles his way through the sessions, expertly managing to dodge all the things that make the subject interesting. Or to do badly in an exam because the young and unproven professor couldn’t make himself understood in a tongue known outside the halls of academia. Who cares if he will be a great professor in five years? You are leaving the school in one.

What you can do about bad teachers

If you get a bad professor, I recommend going step by step, as follows.

1. First, do a reality check
The first thing I would recommend is to check with your classmates and see if they are of the same opinion. I remember being very dissatisfied with a certain professor – let’s call him professor Williams – whom I found to be completely vague in his teaching. One day, I expressed my frustrations to a student from the other section, a guy by the name of Pieter, who had also been taught by professor Williams. Pieter looked at me in great surprise:
“Williams? Are you serious? He’s my favorite professor!”
I looked at his face for signs of sarcasm, but found to my surprise that he wasn’t being the least bit ironic. He seriously thought that Williams was a great teacher. I asked around a bit more and found out that he wasn’t the only one who thought so. It occurred to me that maybe I should give Williams a second chance before I acted upon my frustrations. And sure enough, once I looked at him with new eyes, he wasn’t as bad as I first thought. Maybe my first, negative impression of the guy had somewhat colored by subsequent judgments of him (although I still fail to see how he could qualify as anyone’s favorite professor. But then, he taught another subject in Pieter’s class – that could have something to do with it).

2. Consider giving personal feedback
Secondly, you can consider taking it up with the professor yourself. Once, after a class had finished, I remember going over to my teammate Bram. Bram, who bears the aptly descriptive surname Cool (yes, that is his real name), was tapping furiously on his laptop, so I asked him what he was working on.
“Oh, I’m just writing the professor an email. I thought there was a number of things he could do better in his class.”

I was quite surprised. In Denmark, my native country, it isn’t normal for students to give instantaneous feedback to their professors, especially not of the critical kind. Bram, however, was Dutch, and Dutch people are generally quite direct. I asked him if it worked.

“I think so. I also wrote to some of our other professors, and they were quite happy to get some constructive input. It’s not like they necessarily do what you ask them to, but most of them take it seriously.” Bram pointed out to me that this was often way better than going through the ‘official’ channels – i.e. talking to the class representative who would then raise it with the professor in a later meeting. It was faster and more specific, and it created less of a fuss. I later did the same thing in another class, with great results. Provided you give your feedback in a friendly and constructive manner, there is a good chance that it will make things better.

3. Use the existing channels to make a complaint
The point with all of this is not to say that you should be tolerant of the occasional bad teacher. Quite the opposite. If the above advice doesn’t make things better, I recommend that you complain actively (and preferably professionally) to your class rep about any bad teaching you may experience.

The point I want to make is, if the school does not react by instantly replacing the bad professor, it is not necessarily because they don’t care about your need for a good education, or that they don’t listen to you. It may just be the case that the professor has personal issues that the school is not at liberty to tell you about.

This is important, because I saw many of my fellow students develop an overly cynical opinion about the school’s administration. Simply put, because we as students didn’t always see an instant reaction to our complaints, many of us started believing that it didn’t matter anyway, that nothing was going to change no matter what we did. And for that reason, a lot of people just gave up and stopped trying to improve things. As it happened, I got involved in a number of things at the school, and as a consequence, I got to meet a lot of the otherwise faceless people that made the decisions. This made me realise that at least in some areas, the school’s administration were more than willing to listen to new ideas. But one thing is certain: nothing is going to change if you don’t let them know what you think.

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