Educational Malpractice at a Business School in Texas

Educational Malpractice at a Business School in Texas: 

An Essay on the Corruption of Higher Education in America 

By Josh M. Beach

2023 

Don’t Believe the Hype

I had been looking at business schools for many years.  I had followed The Economist business school rankings for decades.  I had an idea about what schools I would ideally like to attend, but they were very expensive and very far away.  I was not rich.  I had a family.  And it was the middle of a global pandemic. 

Thus, I looked more practically at schools that I could afford, and that were close to home, and which offered on-line instruction so I wouldn’t die of a deadly virus in a classroom. 

In looking closer to home, I came across the business school at the University of Texas at Dallas.  The university has a good academic reputation, and my step daughter was just finishing up her undergraduate degree at this university. 

According to the Naveen Jindal School of Management’s website, it is ranked somewhere between 7th to 38th in terms of best MBA program in America, and also between 40th and 79th in terms of the top global MBA programs. 

Because I was going back to school during a pandemic, which meant completely online, I also saw that this school was tied at 6th place for Best Online Master’s in Business Programs, according to U.S. News & World Report. 

Later in 2021, after I was enrolled as a student, UTD’s Naveen Jindal School of Management reported that it had risen from 81st place up to 73rd place in the 2021 Financial Times rankings, largely due to the increase in published research articles by full-time faculty.  The Princeton Review ranked it 40th out of all colleges in the country based on “academic excellence, affordability and career prospects for graduates.”  The school was ranked first to 11th in various measures of published academic research.  Also, Bloomberg Businessweek for their Best B-School MBA ranked the school 32 out of 119 MBA programs, rising four places, and ranked it 11th for public universities.[1]

Importantly, the school was also relatively cheap for a business school, with in-state tuition at only about $25,000 a year (two full semesters plus summer school), while the top two programs in the state charged over $50,000 a year.  U.S. News ranked this business school number 1 in terms of salary-to-debt ratios of MBA graduates.  U. S. News also ranked it as a top “value school,” although the university claimed to be in “the top 50 nationwide,”[2] but when you go to the actual list UT Dallas ranks #135,[3] so UTD is guilty of some false marketing.

On paper, this looked like a good school.  As the Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported, colleges and universities are “obsessed” over their national rankings and advertise their positions every chance they get so they can attract more students.[4]  It’s often the easiest accessible data for students to compare schools before applying.

But as many scholars have demonstrated, never judge a university by its rankings.  They don’t tell you anything about the actual quality of program.  Malcom Gladwell recently discussed on his podcast Revisionist History, higher education rankings are meaningless when it comes to the actually academic quality of institutions.[5]  Colin Diver goes much further.  He was formerly the President of Reed College, a trustee of Amherst College, Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and a former professor of law of economics.  He has argued that rankings are a scam that often “create powerful incentives to manipulate data and distort institutional behavior.”[6]

Columbia Math professor Michael Thaddeus was able to recently get Columbia University to withhold data from U.S. News & World Report because he found that “several of the key figures supporting Columbia’s high ranking are inaccurate, dubious or highly misleading.”[7]

The Deans at UTD’s Naveen Jindal School of Management often call attention to their high rankings as proof of a high-quality university program. 

But the Naveen Jindal School of Management is anything but a quality university school.  After earning my MBA there, I would argue that this business school a fraudulent degree mill that doesn’t care about either educational standards, or the educational and labor market needs of their students. 

Business school rankings are meaningless.  I was lied to.  Had I known the truth, I would have never enrolled in this school.  I was sold substandard services.  My educational experience has been awful.  It is the worst schooling experience of my life.  I didn’t learn anything of value in my classes, although due to my own self-learning efforts honed during decades of study and scholarly research and publication, I was able to read about 250 books and academic articles on my own time, which taught me a great deal about business management.

If UTD were honest business that was actually accountable to its customers, then I would demand my money back.  But universities don’t care about the educational needs of their students.  So-called “higher education” in the United States has become just another empty ritual, especially in Texas.

So, while I am singling out in this essay The Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas, the malpractices that I describe can be found in many institutions of “higher education” across the state of Texas and the U.S.  I used to work at the University of Texas at San Antonio and found the same fraudulent practices there.  I’ve also seen these malpractices all across California too, as well as South Korea and China.  Empty, useless, ritualized schooling is endemic around the world. 

Some critics, like Kevin Carey, director of the education policy program at New America, a think tank in Washington, D.C., have gone so far as to call many college degree programs, especially master’s degree programs, fraudulent “scams” because the quality of education is so low, the cost is so high, and there is often no direct link to a good job if you graduate so students are stuck with costly debt for the rest of their life.[8]

The shabby state of the curriculum is one reason why MBA programs do not live up to the advertised hype of higher salaries and better careers, which management professors Pfeffer & Fong (2002) have proven to be widely publicized but false claims.[9]

Is There an Instructor in This Course?

It’s commonplace for administrators in higher education to automate online courses so much that they virtually eliminate the possibility of teaching.  Not only does this deny students any chance for an authentic learning experience, it can also create a lot a lot of confusion.  Often written materials, like the syllabus, and course videos, are often far from clear, especially when the instructor is a poor writer or speaker.  In face-to-face communication, you can ask questions and get clarifications.  That is often impossible in on-line schooling.

There is also a darker side to online instruction.  It is easy for instructors to commit fraud by shirking many of the basic requirements of the job, like interacting with students and answering questions.  That’s what I found at the University of Texas at Dallas. 

For example, in one of my classes at UT Dallas there was no syllabus posted and no course by the first day of class.  I had emailed the professor a couple of weeks before the semester started, asking about a book list and a syllabus, but there was no reply.  On the first day of class, when all the materials were supposed to be posted online, there was nothing, not even a syllabus, which was required to be posted on the first day of class by state law.  Most of the class had joined together on an app, and several students said they had emailed the professor, but did not get a response.  By the end of the first day, I sent an email off to the Associate Dean to complain and hopefully get some action in place so we could start the course.  The Dean just forwarded my email to the professor and another professor who was the Area Coordinator, but obviously the incompetent professor had already proven that she didn’t respond to emails.  By the end of the second day of the first week, there was still no syllabus and no class, so I emailed the Senior Associate Dean who texted the professor.

On another occasion, there was a syllabus and course materials, but very little help from the professor, who gave his students much less than what was legally required for a college class in Texas.  What follows is the text of an email that I sent to the Dean of the School of Business on September 16, 2020 because I was disgusted with the low quality of service that I was getting in a Calculus class my first semester.

“Dear Dean,

There is an important matter that I need to bring to your attention.  I’m not sure you can do anything about this situation now, but hopefully you can intervene to make changes for future students.

I am a first semester MBA student taking OPRE 6303 this fall.

While you can consider this a student complaint about a professor, I think it would be more accurate to think of this as a collegial complaint about an unprofessional colleague.  I was a college and university lecturer for 20 years, most recently at UT San Antonio, and I’ve never seen a collogue behave so unprofessionally, nor have I ever experienced such unprofessional behavior during the 11+ years that I have been a full-time undergraduate and graduate student.

I am taking Calculus with Dr X, which is a 3-credit course.

I was expecting three hours a week of instruction, plus office hours to ask further questions.

Instead, over the first 6 weeks, our class has received 10 videos.  These videos total about 109 min, which is less than two hours of instruction.

Going by Carnegie credit hours, which should be a basic part of your department’s accreditation process, we should have received 18 hours of instruction by this point.

Plus, it is a standard requirement for professors to offer at least 1 office hour a week per 3 credit class, plus kind professors offer more time for those who need more help.  Our professor held no office hours the first week, and then initiated 30 min of office hours once a week. 

We also have a TA who holds one office hour a week, but he is not as knowledgeable as the professor, and therefore, not the best resource.

I find this situation alone to be very unprofessional.  I am paying over $2500 for a 3-credit course, but getting a small fraction of the standard instruction time that is supposed to come with this course.  I was also struggling for the first three weeks, and I was getting almost no help, except some from the TA who was overwhelmed also trying to help many other students.

To make matters worse, Dr. X skips a lot of steps when he hastily solves problems in the videos.  This makes it impossible for an inexperienced learner to actually follow along and learn how to do a problem.  This is also the case with his written “practice” test worksheets, which have solutions to the problems, but the solutions either skip a lot of steps, or use methods and notations that are not standardly used when teaching this material (I found out about that from the tutor I had to hire).

And there is no assigned textbook, so there is no way for a student to understand all the steps to solve any problem without asking either the TA or the professor, but they are not readily available for help, nor is the TA help always accurate.

Furthermore, all professors are required to respond to student emails and make an effort to respond to student requests for help.  I emailed Dr. X with a very detailed message with specific pedagogical terminology that a competent teacher should know.  He ignored all of my issues and requests.  He responded with an extremely condescending reply, essentially telling me that I had a “perception” problem that he was powerless to help.  He then asked me to give him times so we could schedule a meeting, but he never responded to my reply.  It’s been 12 days.  After waiting one day, I hired a private tutor.

Also, his unprofessional, condescending attitude is in almost every one of his videos where he says at least 2-3 times in each video how “easy” and “simple” the material is, but to beginning learners like myself, the material is anything but easy or simple.  I found this language offensive.

Finally, I have had to pay a lot of money to hire a private math tutor who holds a PhD and is a college lecturer.  With his help, I was actually able to learn all of the material quite quickly because he is a competent teacher, although it is taking a lot of time to practice and learn how to appropriate recall basic concepts to answer specific problems. 

And in working with my tutor, he pointed out several places in the “practice quizzes” where Dr. X had typos, which caused me a lot of grief as I was trying to work through problems when I first started, and I’m sure it has also been a roadblock to other students. 

Furthermore, my tutor explained how the TA for our class gave us misleading and incorrect information about some problem types, which also caused me some pain due to lost time and confusion. 

My tutor also said that Dr. X throws out a lot un unnecessarily complex and advanced problems on his worksheets, which are not very appropriate for inexperienced learners because they cause a lot of confusion.  This has also been the case with some of the problems he included on his practice tests.

I’m not sure what you can do about these issues at this point, but I am struggling with this class and there is a chance that I will not be able to pass.  While I am definitely inexperienced, incompetent, and out of practice with math, Dr. X has made my situation much worse.  Had I had a competent professor who gave his students the full amount of time he is institutionally required to give then I would be doing much better in this class. 

While I am getting a great education from my tutor, I am getting almost nothing of value from my actual UTD class.

Please keep my information fully confidential so there can be no retaliation against me while I finish this class.  I have also attached my email correspondence with Dr. X.”

And what was the result of my email? 

Well, the Dean did respond.  He agreed that these incidents were not kosher, but he didn’t take the time to say much else.  He wrote a very short reply stating, “Thank you for reaching out to me.  What you describe is unacceptable.  I apologize.  I will ask for corrective action.  We will keep your email confidential.” 

Was there corrective action?  Yes, well, kind of. 

Some of the issues were addressed, at least for a short while.  The professor was still teaching a full load the next semester so clearly there were no repercussions.  I find it hard to believe that nobody has complained about this professor before.  Clearly the department is quite permissive with mal-practicing professors, probably because teaching doesn’t matter for the performance reviews of most professors, which I wrote about in one of my most recent books on higher education.

After I complained to the Dean, and without saying anything to the class, the instructor all of the sudden started to spend more time at office hours.  He also created more and longer videos explaining concepts in a more step-by-step fashion.  He also stopped saying how easy all of the math concepts were as he was explaining them.  Small changes, but they were changes.

However, the professor’s overall lack of care for the class, and his uncaring attitude for students, persisted, especially careless typos on course materials, and worst of all, lots of typos and mistakes on exams.

For example, take exams.  The whole course consisted of three exams.  Fail one, and you fail the course.  With this type of class structure, it is very unprofessional, and also very unkind, to write bad tests that are hard to read because they are full of typos and broken sentences. 

After one of the early exams, I emailed the professor and said that there was one question that was grammatically incorrect, which made it unclear to read.  I had trouble answering the question.  The first clause of the sentence was completely unclear.  The second clause focused on “unity,” so I assumed it was referring to an identity matrix, and that’s how I answered it, but I simply didn’t know what it was asking. 

I’m pretty sure I got that question wrong.  But I don’t know because we never got any actual feedback on exams.  In fact, there was never any feedback from the professor to students about anything.

I pointed out to the professor that he did cover the topic of the zero matrix in his lecture very briefly, but he didn’t mention anything specific about it being a different type of entity that could be multiplied to any size matrix.  On the exam, he asked a question that seemed very obscure, given there was no practice question on this concept, or any application of the concept in his videotaped lectures.  

When I raised these issues with my professor, he dismissed them.  My emails were not appreciated.  He ignored my concerns with a short response that made it seem like it was my fault for not being able to read his exam. 

Before another big exam, I took the short practice test online and noticed that there was an error.  After taking the test, the computer indicated “right” and “wrong” answers, but one of the “correct” answers for a question was wrong. 

I emailed the professor and explained what the correct answer was and I attached a screen shot of the incorrect answer on the test marked as “correct.”  I even showed it to my math tutor and he agreed that it was incorrect.  I emailed the professor to fix this part of the practice exam, and I also said he needed to “double check the test itself to make sure there are no other errors,” as there had already been typos and badly written sentences on the major exams. 

The professor replied that he didn’t see the problem, but he did note that he had not written a complete sentence for the test question, which he fixed, but he didn’t actually fix how the computer was grading the questions. 

The final exam in this class was a nightmare.  It was perhaps the most traumatizing test-taking experience I have ever had in 25 years as a student. 

I spent over two thousand dollars on tutoring lessons over the course of the semester, and I worked quite hard on learning calculus.  I learned a lot from my tutor.  He was great.  I learned nothing at all from my professor.  In fact, the course would have been better with no instructor at all. 

I was quite confident that I would do well on the final exam, and I needed to do well in order to pass the class with a B or higher.  But there were more typos on the final exam, although I didn’t realize how many typos there were until after I failed the exam.

There were several badly written questions, which I should have expected.  I did my best answering them, and I think I got those questions right.  But then there were two questions in the middle of the test with numbers written incorrectly.  I didn’t know it at the time, but it was impossible to answer those questions.  The professor had written non-sensical questions that could not be answered.

It was a multiple-choice format, so you had to select one of four possible answers.  I did all of the work, many, many times. I went over each of the two flawed questions again and again, but I ran low on time so I had to rush through the rest of test to finish.  The time ran out before I could finish. 

My heart was racing for the last 30 minutes.  The fear of failure and panic started to overwhelm my cognitive abilities.  I’ve never failed a test since my sophomore year of college.  I thought I had failed the test and the class.  It was a horrible feeling.

But then I noticed that I was able to keep working, somehow time didn’t run out, so I continued to answer the last questions the best I could.  I ended up being able to finish the exam, except for the questions that I could not answer.

Then I went to email the TA pictures of my written work.  That’s when I saw the email from the professor, which he sent during the final exam, when we don’t have access to our email or any other program on our computer. 

He admitted in a very dismissive way that he had accidentally put a couple of typos in exam, which made two questions impossible to answer.  He said he would look over the exams and grade them himself, rather than rely on the automated computer to score the exams like the other tests. 

I’m not sure how he graded our exams, or even if he graded our exams.  He never released grades for final exam.  There was no feedback, nor any explanation of how we did on the test.  He just gave us final course grades. 

I got an A- for a final grade. 

Why?  I’ll never know. 

Student learning was not an objective in that course.  Students were merely supposed to follow directions and play with numbers on badly written standardized tests.  It was a complete waste of my time.  But I did learn a great deal from my private tutor, for a couple thousand extra dollars. My experience in the UTD course was an expensive and stressful waste of time.  I felt completely disrespected by the institution.

An Education or Quid Pro Quo?

Sadly, that was not my only horrible experience.  In another course on business management fundamentals, we spent most of our time reading a poorly written textbook that was meant for undergraduates.  The professor spent class time lecturing.  She rarely said anything that wasn’t already mentioned in the textbook.  She just droned on and on.  The whole class was a waste of time. 

What made the experience even worse was that I was genuinely interested in the subject matter of the course.  But it worked out.  I spent class time with the volume off so I could read books on business management (which weren’t on the syllabus).  I was able to learn, despite a bad teacher, bad textbooks, and a badly designed course.

At a couple of point during each class, students broke out into “discussion” groups online.  However, most of the students had nothing to say.  Sometimes, no one in a break-out group would respond to questions or comments.  I never knew for sure, but either the students weren’t actually there, they didn’t want to talk, or they didn’t have the technical tools to participate.  I talked a bit, when I actually had conversation partners, but mostly I spent “discussion” time reading books.

Almost all assignments were poorly written multiple-choice tests, just like my math class.  I complained to the professor about the tests.  They were vague, misleadingly written, and often open-ended with many possible “correct” answers, even though there was only ONE correct answer to select for the test.  

In one case, there was a question about John Dewey, who I know a lot about.  Dewey was mentioned in one obscure sentence in the textbook.  I remember that because I stopped in anger at how badly the textbook treated this complex philosopher and his ideas.  On the test, the “right” answer about John Dewey was actually factually wrong – in fact, all the provided multiple-choice answers were wrong. 

I wrote a long email complaining about her tests, and that question in particular.  Surprisingly, the professor gave me the opportunity to negotiate a new course projects so I wouldn’t have to take any more of her standardized tests.  Instead, I had to write eight essays, on top of the essay I already wrote in the class, which was technically a “team” project, but I did almost all of the work because my partners were clueless and unmotivated.

But just like the math class, even though I wrote all these essays, not a single one received a grade or any feedback.  I got an A in the class, or an A-, but I’m not sure why I got the grade I did.  None of the professors in the department ever gave students any feedback on their projects or tests.

Later that semester, I was surprised to get an email from this professor asking if I would be interested in helping her on her research project.  She was going to write a new article for publication, and she was working with another professor in the department.  She wanted to bring me on as a co-author. 

I didn’t know anything about her project, so I was hesitant.  Plus, publishing an article in a business journal wouldn’t help me personally in any way.  And I didn’t want my name associated with a topic, methods, or conclusions that I didn’t believe in.  I was also finishing up what would become two new books for publication.  So, I wasn’t very interested.

But I thought it would be a way to earn course credit.  I could avoid more standardized tests.  So, I asked her to do an independent study class.  This way, I would get course credit, which would enable me to finish my degree faster.  I also hedged, and said that I would help in any way that I could with comments and research, but I never said that I would write the article with them.  I didn’t want to have my name attached to a sub-standard article. 

We both signed an independent study request form.  It was approved by the Dean.  The form stated that I would be supplying essays and literature reviews to support their paper project, but it did not say that I would actually write their paper. 

Once the form was signed, she sent over some articles.  I got into the research they relied upon for their study, but I found it methodologically flawed, to say the least.  When I read the published work of the other professor from the business school at UT Dallas, I was shocked at how bad it was.  I don’t understand how it could have ever got published.

For example, one of his studies published in the International Journal of Human Resource Management in 2006 relied upon a badly outdated theoretical framework from 1961.  You read that right, the authors of this research paper somehow believed that no relevant research on their theoretical framework had been conducted in over 45 years.  They based their whole study on an ancient relic of a theory, as if it were some type of classic, holy text with bedrock axioms that supposedly would remain relevant forever.  I was embarrassed reading this paper.

So, what were the hypotheses that were being statistically tested?  The first hypothesis was that people from different countries would have different values?  Any student of anthropology, sociology, political science, or history would know this claim doesn’t really need to be tested, at least not with the highly rigid and abstract typology that these authors used.  Of course, people from different cultures have different values.  Anthropologists have known that for over a century, and it is already well documented.

And what countries were sampled?  India, Poland, Russia, and the U.S.  Why these four countries?  The authors don’t admit it, but this random selection was based on convivence, rather than any theoretical considerations.  There is really no rational way to link these populations into a single study.

And what was the second hypothesis? That the U.S. had a “capitalistic system,” which created different values from the other three countries, ostensibly because these other countries did not have a capitalist system.  This hypothesis is not only highly simplistic, it is also false.  It is based on a misunderstanding of what the concept of culture and nationality entails, and also a clear misunderstanding of the specific cultural patterns of these four countries.  It is naive and nonsensical to believe that the U.S. could be clearly defined by one attribute (capitalism), which the other three countries lacked, which they didn’t.  All four countries were capitalistic in some form or another, and they all had other important characteristics, but this study only acknowledged simplistic, naive, and false stereotypes.

This article stated many claims that were highly generalized, conceptually confused, sometimes tritely true, and sometimes false.  Some of the claims presented as facts that were actually debatable, if not clearly false.  But the real weakness of this paper had to do with the flawed statistics being used. 

The authors not only chose an indefensible sample of four countries, but they also collected a non-random and small sample of only 341 to 578 respondents from each country.  These authors believed that they could make meaningful statistical conclusions with only about 500 people from each country.  For a country like India, with a population of over 1 billion people, this is highly problematic, to say the least.  How are 500 people supposed to randomly represent over 1 billion? 

These samples were also highly skewed by socio-economic factors.  Almost all respondents were educated professionals, which make these samples incompatible with the highly generalized and sweeping cultural hypotheses being studied.  How are 500 highly educated professional Indians or Russians supposed to represent the total population for each country in order to reasonably demonstrate divergent cultural values between different nations? 

I would expect naive undergraduates to make such rookie mistakes, but tenured professors?  And how did a study like this even get published?  Your guess is as good as mine.

Needless to say, drivel like this should never have been published.  I was embarrassed simply to waste my time reading these articles.  Clearly, there are academic backwaters in the field of business, which publish low quality work that is somewhere between the level of a precocious undergraduate to the level of a lazy graduate student.  It was really, really bad.  I often see such bad work as a reviewer for annual social scientific conferences and academic journals, but I was surprised at how bad research could actually get published.

So, I wrote a highly critical literature review citing some of the most respected, gold standard research on the topic.  I also pointed out the flaws of my professor’s and her colleagues theoretical and methodological foundations.  I wrote that her colleagues “use incomplete, out-of-date, and irrelevant literature reviews, faulty and invalid theoretical foundations based on faulty literature reviews, and faulty methodology that result in questionable studies that produce invalid, statistically meaningless, and/or commonplace results that would not be publishable in most social-scientific fields of study.” 

I also criticized the Dutch scholar Geert Hofstede, who published highly flawed and questionable work, but got quite famous in business schools over the past couple of decades.  Some business professors love his work, particularly because he enables them to make crass cultural stereotypes in order to label and evaluate employees.  I argued that “Hofstede’s theory and his results should not be used or relied upon.  Serious social scientists have largely ignored Hofstede’s work because of its many theoretical and methodological flaws.  Hofstede is mostly cited by scholars in business management and international business, perhaps because these scholars have little training cultural methodology and so do not fully understand the limitations of Hofstede’s work.”

I also made several other critical suggestions, especially about the survey instruments, and how the statistical data was being analyzed.  I pointed out that survey data are not self-explanatory and that survey data collection tools never produce neutral measurements.  As business management professor Henry Mintzberg said in his study, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, “Answers come cheap on seven-point scales” (p. 93).  Mintzberg quoted another management professor who explained how “self-selected respondents” have “little reason to respond accurately” and sometimes don’t even know “what they were talking about” (p. 93).

My professor and her colleagues were not only operating with a flawed theoretical foundation, there were also using flawed survey instruments, and they were using flawed data samples.  There was no way that I could be associated with such sloppy research, and I was embarrassed simply to read this mess, and I was highly surprised that any academic journal would have published such meaningless scholarship.  This is an example of how there are murky academic backwaters in many disciplines that publish highly questionable “research,” one step above the predatory journals that simply publish anything for a fee.

These scholars seemed oblivious to point made by management professor Jeffrey Pfeffer forty years ago in his book Organizations and Organization Theory (1982).  Pfeffer criticized the naive practice of using invalid questionnaires to conduct social scientific research: “By imposing the researcher’s concepts and language on the subject though questionnaires, one largely determines that the result will be consistent with those concepts and measurements” (p. 76).  Pfeffer went on to sardonically add, “It is not clear, simply put, whether the results of much of the research in this tradition tell us anything about the world of organizations or those who populate that world, but they certainly tell us a lot about those who study organizations and how they view the world” (p. 76).  So much shoddy scholarship in the social sciences, especially in the field of business, is just pretentious navel gazing re-packaged with a scientistic veneer. 

I delivered this 40-page critique, with a list of recommendations.  I knew it wasn’t the response my professor expected or wanted, and I knew she would take it badly on some level. 

But I was hopeful she would accept the offering, say I wasn’t the right fit to go forward, and then give me course credit for my work because I delivered exactly what I said I would, which was in writing on the official school form signed by all parties.  I provided essays and literature reviews, just like I said I would.  I was also genuinely willing to help them correct their mistakes.

I had hoped that maybe, the professor might say, hey, I never looked at it that way, so let’s discuss a better approach, so my research would be stronger. With such a response, I would have been willing to do some more work to help the project along.  But I strongly doubted she would have this kind of response.

Guess what happened?

My professor was offended that I criticized her methodology.  She said she was surprised by my recommendations, and she weakly defended her work.  But more importantly, she basically said that I was not the right fit for the project because all she wanted was someone to write her paper for her.  Then she said that obviously she could not work with me on an independent study. 

Clearly, she was too filled with emotion to remember that she had already negotiated with me and that she had already agreed to the independent study.  We had both signed the form.  It was approved by the Dean.  The independent study was already official.

Now, apparently, that contract was null and void because my professor was offended by my critical conclusions. When a professor criticizes another professor for the peer review process, it is perfectly acceptable.  When a student criticizes a professor, even though the student WAS a former professor, it is unacceptable.  It’s a double standard I’ve run into before, always with negative consequences for me.

This is just one of many examples I could cite to explain how the whole notion of academic freedom and critical debate in higher education are empty ideals, especially here in Texas.  They are supposedly some of the bedrock values of higher education, but only if one tenured professor criticizes another tenured professor’s work, and even then, many professors wilt like jilted flowers and emotionally lash out when they are criticized by their colleagues.  What happens when a powerless graduate student criticizes a professor?  Nothing good, I can tell you that.  It’s the main reason I wasn’t able to earn my PhD, which is an interesting story I’ve written about.

Of course, I could have tried to fight my professor by pointing to the form that had been signed.  I had the signed form and I had her emails.  But why bother?  I didn’t really want to work with that professor anyway due to the abysmally low research standards she had, and her obvious ignorance about the topic she was researching.  I just let it go. I dropped the independent study course.

For me, it was just further proof that the Naveen Jindal School of Management at The University of Texas at Dallas was not an educational institution at all.  It was all just a sham.  Students were being used for the benefits of professors.  We paid their salaries and we were supposed to do whatever they told us to do, and we were supposed to sit there and take it with smiles on our face.

Clearly, this professor did not care about me or my learning as a student.  I was nothing to her.  My independent study was not about my education.  It was simply to provide her with free labor so she could publish another article and get a promotion. 

The only thing that mattered to my professor was her objectives, her research agenda, getting her paper written the fastest and easiest way possible, so she could reap the professional rewards with a better yearly evaluation and possible higher salary.  My needs as a student and as a learner were obviously never considered.  I was nothing but an object to be used and then thrown away.

Since when is an independent study class in graduate school about the needs and interests of the student as a learner?  I should have known better.  Clearly that is a silly and antiquated notion.

The Senseless Cruelty of Small-Minded Math Professors

I took a couple of math courses from the same professor, not the one I discussed above, but a different professor.  One was a statistics class.  The other was a class on supply management, but according to the professor and the textbook she chose, everything about supply management could be boiled down to complex calculus equations.  This particular math teacher never even attempted to teach.  She simply offered video lectures that added nothing beyond the textbook.  In fact, her lectures were inferior to the textbook, which offered much more explanation and detail.  However, the textbook she chose was filled with typos and errors in the answers for the questions at the end of every chapter. 

Because this professor didn’t teach at all, students had to teach themselves by reading the textbook and working through the sample problems, with the help of the answer key.  But this was sometimes impossible because the answer key was wrong due to typos, omissions, or just false information.  I emailed the professor several times about this and her response was: “students are smart enough to recognize a typo.” One way to interpret this statement was that she was just too lazy to do anything to alert students to typos or to compensate for them by offering correct solutions.  Another way to interpret this statement was that she was calling me stupid because I, for one, could not properly learn the material when I didn’t have an accurate model to use as a guide.  Clearly, I was too stupid to recognize a type and know the correct information that was supposed to be there.

This arrogant professor never engaged with students or offered any helpful information – or any help at all.  At the end of the above email she said, “I will ask the course TA to address your concern,” which was her standard answer to every question.  The TA was helpful, but as a student, she was not an expert and she was very bad a communicating clearly with students, and more than a little overwhelmed with time because she had to do all the actual teaching work for the course because the professor was too lazy.

This professor was so lazy that she didn’t even both to update her syllabus with the correct chapter numbers and titles from the textbook, which had changed edition.  Not only was it hard to read and understand the textbook, it was difficult just to read her syllabus.  She also had several errors on her syllabus for the statistics course.

The irony of this professor’s response, and overall lack of care in the course, was that the class covered the Toyota Manufacturing system and the topic of quality control, where front-line workers have the responsibility to stop the line to point out defects so they can be immediately fixed.  This a great example of professors who “teach” what they do not know or cannot practice. 

This professor didn’t care about the quality of her course, catching and fixing errors, or teaching students, or even the mental health of students who struggle through a difficult math course, which was made more difficult with confusing homework that was full of errors.  She simply dismissed student concerns, if not passively aggressively mocking them, by telling us to figure things out for ourselves.  What happens to businesses disdain their customers like this?  They go bankrupt.  But not a university level MBA program.  This type of malpractice is the status quo because there is no accountability to students, or their future employers.

This professor also committed malpractice intellectually and academically by taking complex subject matter and reducing it to tricky multiple-choice questions with supposedly clear and discrete “right” answers.  But many of her exam questions were far from clear because they were badly worded and ambiguous, especially in the statistics class.  One question was about “discrete” variables, which I got wrong because, as the professor pointed out, I was “over thinking the question” by “inserting a socially acceptable distinction” into a “non-social question.”  She clearly has an impoverished, and false, epistemological understanding of the world where in her mind there are “non-social” meanings attached to words and concepts.  She lives in small world demarcated by the clean logic of calculus, but she clearly is clueless about how calculus and statistics get used by real human beings in the social world to try to solve real problems. 

The textbook in this class did offer real world problems with which to apply statistical tools.  And the textbook was very clear about the messy judgments that practitioners have to make when interpreting the mathematical results.  However, the professor didn’t seem to understand how statistics are actually used in the world - the strengths and weaknesses of statistical methods and conclusions.  On our exams, we were offered nothing more than tricky word problems.  On the final exam, about 8% of the grade boiled down to two questions defining the same big, useless concept.  And because her exam was open-book, these two questions merely tested the dexterity of our fingers to look up the definition of this word in the book. 

I like statistics and I was enthusiastic about the class, but her lack of any teaching and her utterly ridiculous exams made me dread her class.  It was utterly demoralizing.  I knew how to conduct the statistical tests using Excel, and how to interpret the results, but those important skills were largely useless because she wanted us to just explain abstract concepts in tricky, standardized questions, or to perform the complex, tedious math by hand just to show that we could do it. 

In a previous statistics class for another master’s program (in the field of Education) we actually combined our knowledge of concepts and our ability to use statistical software to collect read world data and design our own research study.  I learned a great deal in that previous course.  In this course at UTD I learned much more math, but nothing about how to actually use statistics to do useful, meaningful research.

The economists John Kay and Mervyn King wrote an insightful book called Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers in which they argue that we live in a “radically uncertain world” that cannot be known or tamed by mathematical equations, which give us a false sense of security.  I actually tried to talk about this book in one of my emails with the professor, and I recommended it to her, but she ignored my comments because, clearly, in her mind she already knew it all and she had nothing to learn from anyone, least of all her ignorant students. 

It is precisely this arrogance, which almost every professor at The Naveen Jindal School of Management had, which creates so many problems in the world, like the great financial crisis of 2007-2010.  Arrogant professors try to turn the messy, uncertain world into a simple puzzle with “well-defined rules and a single solution,” which can be clearly stated on a multiple-choice test (p. 20).  But the most important and pressing problem in the world are “ill defined” and there is not simple solution that everyone would agree on (p. 97).  While mathematical data and models are very helpful analytical tools, they are “never descriptive of the world as it really it” and so are of limited value in solving read world problems (pp. 96, 247).  Mathematics and deductive reasoning will never replace the messy practice of decision making. 

Henry Mintzberg talked about this predicament in his book Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development.  He explained that there was a deep set “assumption” in business schools that “one cannot be a proper manager without mathematical ability,” which he noted “would come as a great surprise to the legions of managers who have succeeded without that ability.”  Mintzberg decried the myopic focus on teaching only quantitative analysis, noting the many “dismal managers who have risen far in the business world with great mathematical skills” (p. 40).

In Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters, management professor Richard P. Rumelt explained how the mathematician Kurt Godel proved that mathematical systems couldn’t definitely solve many important problems, even within the closed domain of mathematical reasoning.  Even sophisticated logical systems, like mathematics, are by their nature “incomplete,” and thereby contain “statements and propositions that cannot be judged true or false within the logic of the system” (p. 285).  Thus, even with mathematics, one has to look beyond the logic of math for answers to complex problems, and especially how to apply one’s conclusions in a practical and useful way.

The math classes at UT Dallas were utterly useless to anyone seeking to one day understand and solve real world problems.  Those students who did well in these classes demonstrated only the useless ability to play stupid, small-world math games with clearly defined solutions.  This is an utterly useless skill in the real world, especially to professionals who hope to manage organizations in order to produce productive results.

Playing School: Dumbed-Down Curriculum, Unresponsive Instructors, & Passive Students

A couple of years ago, I was looking at online courses in order to research ideas for the non-profit organization that I was running.  I came across a new breed of online MBA programs, which offered certification in core subjects for low prices.  Some programs were even free because they sold graduates to corporate head-hunters for high fees. 

One of these programs was called Smartly, now called Quantic, which is run by the business Pedago.  It was a very well-designed web course that was organized around core-subject modules.  I did several of the modules and liked the user experience a lot.  It gave me great ideas about how to create something similar for my non-profit, if I was ever able to raise the funds for an IT expansion of the organization’s core services.

But taking those modules also got me to thinking about the meaning of “higher education,” and the idea of educational quality for MBA programs, and other graduate degrees.  While the Smartly website was certainly cheap (it was free), well designed, up to date, and easy to use, it also was a hollow academic shell that did not adequately reproduce the fullness of what “higher education” is supposed to be about.  It was just a ritualized academic exercise that led to a meaningless certification. 

I thought to myself that if I ever went back to school for an MBA, I would choose a traditional program at a university because I wanted to get an actual education.

But high quality, traditional MBA programs are very, very expensive.  Unless you are willing to pay over $100,000 a year to earn a degree at a private, ivy league school or at a flagship state university, there is really no way to get anything resembling quality higher education.  I really wanted to enroll at Rice University, but the program would have costs over $120,000, plus living expenses and travel to Houston for two years.  Few people can afford that.  I certainly couldn’t.

Plus, I was enrolling during a pandemic, so I knew that I had to take a web program, for obvious health reasons.  I didn’t want to waste money on an expensive degree from a good school because I thought all programs would be of roughly the same low quality, given the online experience.

I knew the sordid truth about undergraduate education at state schools and community colleges across the U.S., having been an undergraduate instructor in higher education for twenty years and a researcher in higher education.  But I was absolutely shocked at how bad graduate schools had become when I enrolled at the University of Texas as Dallas. 

I’m not getting “higher education.”  I’m not getting any education. I might as well have enrolled in Trump University.  Seriously, it was that bad.

John Cassidy at The New Yorker famously warned his readers that Trump University was “worse than you think.”  Well, the same could be said about The Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas.  It has been a horrible educational experience, as I’ve already discussed.  But it’s worse than you think.

Let’s start with the basics.

All business schools use the “case-study” as the primary curricular and pedagogical method to teach students about business practices.  James G. March was a professor of management, education, sociology, and political science at Stanford University.  In his book The Ambiguities of Experience, March explained the theoretical foundation of management education, which for decades has been based on learning from experience through case studies.  The stories in case studies are supposed to give students a large repertoire of “changing experiences” and “good practices.” These stories supposedly serve as a models to help better inform the future decisions of managers once they are on the job. 

Professors of Management Charles A. O’Reilly III and Jeffrey Pfeffer argued in their book Hidden Value: How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People that the “most effective executive education” happens “not through lectures by professors or other experts but through engaged discussions of examples, typically in the form of a case, in which the interactions among the participants generates a variety of possibilities and perspectives” (p. ix).  In Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters, management professor Richard P. Rumelt illustrates the proper practice of the case study method as a tool to for discussion and critical examination of complex problems that have no clear solutions.

However, as March explained, this type a pedagogical tool often produces only “low intellect” learning, and it can easily devolve into an empty ritual.  By reading case study stories, students gain little knowledge, and they get no deep understanding of the issue or problem discussed in the article.  Most case studies come in the form of very short articles that have very few details.

Plus, case studies usually offer only the easy to see, surface details that can be easily recollected by biased participants.  These details are organized into a superficial, and often subjective, story about what happened at a business and why.  Most of the time, it’s essentially fancy gossip. 

Henry Mintzberg did a fine job critiquing the case study method in his book Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development (pp. 48-64).  Unfortunately, “the practice of managing cannot be replicated in a classroom the way chemical reactions are replicated in a laboratory,” especially with short and superficial case studies (pp. 53, 59).  Thus, according to management professor Sterling Livingston, by relying on the case study method, “managers are not taught in formal education programs what they most need to know to build successful careers in management” (quoted in Mintzberg, p. 56).

This is why management researchers have warned for at least sixty years that case studies are a poor source of knowledge for training managers.  This was the conclusion of a report published in 1959 by the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation, entitled The Education of American Businessmen.  This basic conclusion is still true today.

O’Reilly and Pfeffer’s book was based on extensive research and each chapter, focusing on a different company, was relatively in-depth, but at The Naveen Jindal School of Management we never read a case study of more than 10 pages.  The best case studies are book length, or at least a full chapter in a book.  But such books were never assigned or discussed by UT Dallas professors.  In fact, real research was almost never assigned in any class, only poorly written, highly general textbooks meant for undergraduates.

But I read quite a few books during my MBA, in fact hundreds, often while ignoring the banal trivialities that my professors were talking about during class.  I read books such as The Art of Innovation, about IDEO, and The Toyota Way, which were both very interesting and useful lessons on the specific ideas, culture, and actions of specific companies.  I learned nothing about management from any professor at The Naveen Jindal School of Management, but I learned amazing knowledge and practical skills from professors like Jeffery Pfeffer.  I read every book he ever wrote, and I am indebted and grateful for his knowledge and wisdom.

When we were assigned case studies at The Naveen Jindal School of Management, they were little more than a short, ambiguous story, like a novel, which we were supposed to subjectively interpret.  And that is what students did, if they even participated in the exercise, which many did not.  Students said whatever they wanted to say, often with trivial generalizations, with no right or wrong answers.  It was all relative.  And the professor’s grading was completely subjective, often awarding more points for brief bullet point format than accuracy or substance.

Students’ subjective opinions usually went undiscussed and unchallenged by other students or the professor.  They just floated in the air, or on the web, as so many useless words that were uttered simply to pass the time in a useless ritual.  This meaningless exercise is the very best that The Naveen Jindal School of Management had to offer. 

Little did I know, but I would be looking back on case study readings as the closest I was going to get to authentic learning at UT Dallas. All of my classes were such a waste of time and money.

Most professors didn’t use the case study method.  Most professors didn’t even bother to try and engage students in the classroom.  Most professors at The Naveen Jindal School of Management used boring, pedantic, and pompous lectures as their only classroom tool. 

At UT Dallas, the classroom was simply a place to disseminate out of date and useless information in a boring ritual called schooling.  There was no learning of any kind.  There was no activity required of students beyond sitting, watching, listening, and recording.  There was no thinking.    

The Naveen Jindal School of Management at UT Dallas is literally stuck in the 19th century.  Things were that bad.

Horace Mann, a 19th century Boston school reformer criticized traditional learning as a useless ritual.  He argued, “hearing recitations from a book is not teaching,” but that is exactly what is still happening at UT Dallas, almost 200 years later.[10] 

In the Naveen Jindal School of Management, professors simply summarize textbooks and present dumb-down factoids on ugly, cluttered PowerPoints, and students are expected to unquestionably memorize this information for a standardized test.  Just like in the 19th century, professors at UT Dallas “drone on through dull hours and dreary routine” lecturing “commonplace” information from textbooks and requiring students to answer “in the exact language of the book.”  Classes were a “dull, uninteresting, tiresome place.”[11]  These quotes are from 19th century reformers critiquing outdated, traditional Bostonian schooling, but they also perfectly describe what is still happening at UT Dallas, and many other schools, colleges, and universities all over America.

What is the purpose of schooling?  Student learning and development?  Don’t be so foolish.  The purpose of schools, classically captured by a satirical magazine in England during the middle of the 19th century:

“Ram it in, cram it in, -

Children’s heads are hollow!

Slam it in, jam it in, -

Still there’s more to follow…[12]

Most classes focused exclusively on the professor’s lectures rather than course textbooks.  In many classes, there was either no textbook, or it was not required to read it.  Thus, the name of the game was recitation and memorization.  Every utterance out of the professor’s mouth was supposed to be carefully transcribed so that it could be faithfully recalled on a standardized test.

When textbooks were used, most of the time they were giant, overpriced, badly written, conceptually bland encyclopedias designed for ignorant undergraduates who knew nothing about the topic.  Almost none were graduate-level books.  I had only one class where we used a book by a first-rate scholar in the field.  Another class used an interesting, but faddish book by a management consultant.  The rest of the books were written by hacks and published by predatory textbook companies.

These bloated informational monstrosities were designed for two central purposes.  First, and most obvious, these books are used to price-gouge students.  Monopolistic textbook companies set whatever prices they want, and students have to pay it.  It’s robbery.

Sometimes, professors get in on the racket, like one of my UT Dallas professors who wrote his own textbook.  He told the class we had to buy the most recent, and most expensive, edition of his textbook, otherwise we would miss out on important, “new” information.  That was a bald-face lie.  He just wanted to pocket more profits.  There is often little that’s new in a “new” edition.  I should know.  I spent many years as a textbook reviewer for all of the major academic publishers.

Large textbooks were also created to make useless, ritualized schooling possible.  Encyclopedic textbooks are the repository of generalized facts, which students have to memorize in order to regurgitate those facts on standardized tests, especially for the mindless multiple-choice tests that were used by most professors at UT Dallas.  Standard pedagogy in most American colleges has been reduced to the same mindless rituals that plagued K-12 schooling over a hundred years ago, where classrooms where “characterized by a lifeless and perfunctory study and recitation of assigned textbook materials,” as explained by an educational professor in 1931.[13]

The Naveen Jindal School of Management did not offer its students any learning or education.  This department offered only useless, ritualized schooling.  I was subjected to an endless series of mindless multiple-choice tests that reward senseless memorization of meaningless factoids that were graded by machines. 

How is that supposed to prepare future business leaders?  Obviously, it’s not. 

As I already pointed out, this fraudulent institution of “higher education” does not serve the best interests of students or society.  This institutions serves itself.

But wait.  It’s worse.

There is an even more brazen and embarrassing smoking gun, which proves that schools like the University of Texas are utterly ignorant of basic educational standards, and unabashedly uncaring about the actual learning of its students.  There was no actual feedback on any school assignment ever.  None.  Not once. 

Yes, there were a couple of short, simplistic comments about grades that were sometimes thrown back at students, but these were nothing more than bureaucratic rationalizations, like “good overview” or “nicely done.” 

One semester I worked with a competent group of students on long marketing document, and we earned a 95% as a grade.  I didn’t care about grades because I knew they were a subjective sham, but two of my group members were disappointed.  They wanted to know why we lost 5 points.  When the marketing professor was asked, he replied that there was one minor issue with the executive summary, but the issue he addressed was not in his rubric for required parts of the assignment. 

Furthermore, his taking 5 points off for this very minor issue represented taking 50% off for that section of the assignment, which was worth a total of 10 points.  Such grading was logically unjustifiable, but that professor simply didn’t care.  He obviously didn’t want to give us a perfect grade of 100 percent, so he just took 5 points off, probably at random, and he didn’t even think about how or why graded the way he did until my group sent the email asking for feedback.

But we got lucky with that email.  Many of the professors did not respond to emails, and most did not address, let alone fix, problems.  One Marketing professor responded to only one of five emails that I sent one semester, in which I made requests or asked for clarifications. 

For real leaning to take place, not only does there need to be a teacher and a curriculum, both of which were completely absent at The Naveen Jindal School of Management, but the teacher needs to evaluate student learning and give students detailed feedback so that students can learn from their mistakes, try again, and get more feedback to see if the learning was better. 

This never happened, ever, at the state-sponsored diploma mill that I was enrolled in.  There was no feedback because the professors are not teachers.  They don’t care about teaching.  And they don’t care at all about student learning.  It was all just a formulaic, ritualistic charade.

But wait, it gets even worse. 

Surely, as The Naveen Jindal School of Management likes to brag about on its website and in mass emails to the department, all these high-quality professors who publish all this high-quality research must be giving amazingly high-quality lectures of cutting-edge importance, right?  Wrong.

Most professors simply rambled off the cuff about the topic of the day.  There was rarely an actual organized lecture, like you would hear at a scholarly academic conference.  Most professors never actually lectured about course textbooks, and when they did, the information they shared was merely summative.  If you actually read the book, which most students did not, lectures were a complete waste of time.  Often, professors would go off on long tangents, taking 30-45 min to go off topic, like discussing famous Super Bowl advertisements, or asking students to talk about trips abroad that they had taken.

Several professors, mostly in the Marketing department, used badly designed and cluttered Power Point slides with outdated images and old examples.  Why?  Mindless tradition.

The management consultant Martin Lindstrom argues in his new book, The Ministry of Common Sense, that Power Point presentations, or “decks,” as they are known in corporate circles, have been a conventional way to waste time at corporate meetings for a long time.  Ignorant managers carry on this largely pointless tradition because they don’t actually know how to lead meetings. 

Lindstrom explains, “In workplaces worldwide, employees seem to be in an intense competition to construct the biggest, longest, most graph-filled, diagram-heavy PowerPoint deck possible” (p. 129).  In You’re About To Make a Terrible Mistake, business management professor Olivier Sibony argues that PowerPoint presentations have their “own special way of smothering discussion” because they are used to “hide the weakness of an argument, to distract the audience with visual tricks, and to hold the floor and limit the time available for debate” (p. 215).  In his book What Were They Thinking?, Stanford University Management professor Jeffrey Pfeffer explained that PowerPoints “elevate format over content” and he argued that they should be banned from meetings (p. 167).

These employees clearly learned this relatively useless skill from old-fashioned business schools, like The Naveen Jindal School of Management.  Often, especially in the Marketing department, students were subjected to old and irrelevant factoids, images, and videos from the 1970s and 1980s.  Take, for example, my Advertising and Promotional Strategy class.  It was taught by the “best” teacher in the department, according to student evaluation survey results, and the fawning praise of other professors in the department. 

This supposedly “great” professor used PowerPoint slides that had been created around 2001, just as the worldwide web was taking off.  It was glaringly obvious to anyone with a brain that the professor was two decades behind the times.  Almost everything he talked about what out of date.  Take for example the topic of media.  He devoted weeks to tv, radio, magazines, and newspapers, but he didn’t devote any lectures to the web or social media, even though the textbook covered these topics.

These outdated materials were not used logically and historically to bring an extra layer of academic depth to the discussion.  The marketing professors at UTD had no understanding of, or appreciation for, historical analysis.  There was never any discussion of history, or politics, or the social sciences. 

No, these outdated lecture materials were used simply because the professors were too damned lazy to update their presentations.  They had clearly been using the same Power Point decks for decades – and many of the corresponding multiple-choice exam questions were also decades old and completely irrelevant. 

These marketing professors were simply lazy and incompetent. They knew that no one cared, not the students, and not the administration. 

My economics professor, Peter Lewin, was even worse.  His only interaction with the class was a couple of emails, each sent a few days before one of the three online exams.  I have included two of his emails below. 

Clearly, he did not care enough to even communicate clearly or professionally with the class, but the level of carelessness in his second email was astonishing (appearing first below).  A child could compose a more professional email.  This is one of the best pieces of direct evidence that I can give that displays the utter incompetence and uncaring attitude of most of the professors in the Business School at UT Dallas.  I also included his first email to the class below it, which displays the same carelessness.

Lewin was an extremely arrogant man who was a bad communicator.  He offered students a taped lecture of PowerPoint slides and printed comments below, which he read.  Many sentences on his PowerPoint slides were grammatically incorrect, like his email.  Many of his statements were ambiguous and hard to understand.  Likewise, many questions on his standardized tests were ambiguous and unclear. 

After one test, on which I did poorly, I pointed out five questions where his language and his logic were unclear at best, which lead to at least two (or more) correct answers, rather than the supposed single “correct” answer to earn the point for the question. 

I met with him to discuss these questions.  He was visibly and audibly angry with me.  He made it very clear that nothing was wrong with any of his slides or quiz questions.  The only problem was me.  I was supposedly completely ignorant and he was completely blameless.  He grudgingly gave me only two extra points because he admitted, albeit with qualifications, that his language was ambiguous in at least to test questions, albeit he only grudgingly gave up those two points.

One of the questions he did not give me credit for had four options: chose one right answer or select “all of the above.”  Two of the answers matched the definition of the concept verbatim from his lecture slides, so there were clearly two right answers, which he acknowledged.  So, logically, choosing only one answer could not be correct, so the right answer, accepting the logical structure of his multiple-choice question, had to be “all of the above.”  However, he denied that the third answer could be correct, although it was worded very vague and could be considered correct depending on how you interpreted the statement.  He wouldn’t give me the extra point.  He kept asking why I didn’t just select the two answers as right, and I kept telling him over and over that the test only allowed for ONE right answer even though two answers were correct, and the third possibly correct.  The logical structure of the test question gave the student only two options: choose one answer, or choose all three answers.  So, if two answers are correct, how are you supposed to answer?  He angry blamed me for being ignorant and stupid, almost shouting at me. 

Clearly this Economics professor was epistemically and psychologically naive, having never heard of basic foundational insights in social psychology established about a half-century ago.  But this dimwitted economics professor was not alone because almost every professor I delt with at The Naveen Jindal School of Management suffered from the same ignorance, especially my math and statistics professors.

By the 1970s and 80s, social psychologists had experimentally demonstrated that, “Rather than being retrieved as static units from memory to represent categories, concepts originate in a highly flexible process that retrieves generic and episodic information in working memory” and that there is “a nontrivial degree of instability even in such familiar, often-used categories,” to say nothing of more esoteric and argumentative concepts (Ross & Nisbett, 2011, p. 68).[14]  There is always “substantial variability from one person to another in the meaning even of rather fundamental concepts.  Hence, any two people are likely to interpret the same situation in somewhat different ways” (p. 65). 

Furthermore, most people “do not recognize the inherent variability in our own construal of events; hence we predict our own behavior with too great confidence.  We similarly fail to recognize both the random (or at least unpredictable) differences between our own and others’ construals of events and the systematic, stable differences.  Consequently, we predict other people’s behavior too confidently and, when confronted with surprising behavior on the part of another person, attribute it to extreme personality traits or to motivational differences between ourselves and the other person, rather than recognizing that the other person may simply have been construing the situation differently” (p. 69).

To put it simply: “The same stimulus often can be interpreted in different ways by different people or by the same person in different contexts” (p. 69).  Almost all people “fail to recognize the degree to which their interpretations of the situation are just that – constructions and inferences rather than faithful reflections of some objective and invariant reality” (p. 85).  This fundamental insight makes all multiple-choice tests of questionable validity in principle.  But then again, every true educator knows that multiple-choice tests were never designed based on learning principles or care for the education of students.  These high stakes tests are political instruments designed to sort and rank students, not educate them.

And what about logical and conceptual consistency between classes?  Nope.  Many of the professors at The Naveen Jindal School of Management can’t get their “facts” straight.  In one marketing class “store brands” and “private labels” where completely different concepts, according to a lecture and a multiple-choice midterm exam.  But in another class, these concepts were considered two ways of stating the same thing. 

I missed several points on two exams because of this inconsistency.  At first, I considered these concepts similar, which they are, but got the question wrong on an exam.  The “right” answer was they were different.  On another exam in a different class, I remembered my punishment on the first exam.  So, I said they were different, only get that question wrong.  Now these concepts were considered the same.

What is the true lesson that students take away from the UT Dallas MBA program? Don’t be rational.  Don’t think.  Just blindly memorize whatever you are told to memorize, no matter how badly stated or inconsistent it may be, and then regurgitate that arbitrary information on a ritualized multiple-choice test. 

At The Naveen Jindal School of Management, students are evaluated mostly for their dog-like ability to blindly follow the dictates of authority and memorize whatever they are told to memorize.

Ironically, one of the marketing professors raved to students about a colleague in the department who was supposed to be an outstanding teacher.  What made this professor such a great teacher?  Student evaluations, which obviously a valid measures of teaching ability.

Since I had done a lot of research on student evaluations as a failed accountability metric, I signed up for several courses with this instructor thinking he was probably just an easy teacher who gave high grades.  Sure enough, he was a lousy teacher, one of the worst teachers I’ve ever had to suffer through.  He rewarded mindless memorization.  That’s all he wanted from students.

Students liked him because all his classes used the same boring formula: pre-packed lectures, multiple-choice tests largely tailored to the lectures and sample quizzes, and simple group assignments. 

However, I suspect that this professor gets the highest student evaluation ratings for another reason.  Students are star struck.  This professor brags about how many times he has been on television as an “expert,” and he shares some of his t.v. interviews with the class.  Of course, none of the students seemed to know that there is an inverse correlation between professors and the media: The more a professor is on television as a media consultant, the lower the quality of his or her scholarship, and the less academic influence he or she has on the disciplinary field.  Most students seemed to equate t.v. time with brilliance. 

I was deeply disturbed with the sloppy, “I don’t care” attitude of most of my professors, especially that sham marketing professor with high student evaluation ratings.  To take another example from my marketing classes, which were embarrassingly low on quality, several multiple-choice questions gave the same answer twice (out of four choices), which goes to show that the professor simply didn’t care.  He couldn’t even be bothered to proof-read his exams to find a glaring mistake.  And this problem happened in more than one marketing class with different professors.  In one class, many of the exam questions were repeated twice.  How does that happen?

Most professors at The Naveen Jindal School of Management used sloppy, unprofessional teaching materials and tests with lots of typos and errors, but the marketing department was the worst.  One marketing professor had many multiple-choice questions on his midterm and final exams with major typos.  Some of these typos included highly generalized and unclear language, which made the questions impossible to rationally answer.  Of course, rationally answering questions was not the point of these exams.  You were just supposed to recognize the same language as the lecture slides and retrieve the “correct” answer from memory. 

There were also many typos due to poor grammar, which made both questions and answers hard to understand.  One marketing professor had cluttered, poorly written slides with many typos, like “word-of-mouse,” instead of “word-of-mouth,” which was actually repeated twice in the same lecture on different slides.  That same professor had slides discussing market demographics and listed baby boomers age range from 55-75.  But later, on the midterm exam, a test question wanted you to choose 45-64 as the “correct” age range for baby booms.  The other key words in the exam sentence matched the professor’s power point slide, so clearly the professor updated his “facts” on his lecture, but not on his test.

In many classes at The Naveen Jindal School of Management all we got were outdated questions on exams corresponding to outdated lectures.  One question on a marketing exam asked about which company had the top brand rating in 2005 (and again in 2007), which was useless trivia on an exam in 2021.  A bunch of questions on a marketing exam used lists silly acronyms, like POP, instead of actually using the names of concepts.  I guess because the professor was too lazy to type out the full names.

Professors expected students to memorize lists of highly general and arbitrary information, sometimes in order, like arbitrary words for the perceptual process.  These words were not standard conceptual labels in the field of psychology, just a professor’s pet labels, which he wanted students to memorize.  Lectures were nothing more that cluttered PowerPoint slides bloated with generalized concepts with formulaic definitions listed in bullet form.  Listen, read, memorize, regurgitate.  Repeat process.  Good dog! 

In one of my marketing classes, the one with the supposedly best teacher in the department, the professor didn’t even bother to write exam questions.  With every group assignment, he asked for five multiple choice questions from students.  Thus, he would collect about a hundred student questions in every class.  Why write your own exams when you can get your students to do it for you?

His exams consisted of these really badly worded, and sometimes nonsensical, student-written questions.  Because he was so lazy, and cared so little about education, he would re-use many of the exact same questions from the mid-term test on the final exam.  And I’m not sure if it was laziness, or simply carelessness, but many of the final exam questions were repeated.  You read that right, he asked students the exact same question twice, not once but six or seven times.

Often, the concepts that we memorized were so highly general as to be meaningless, not to say highly inaccurate.  For example, one marketing professor stated, “consumers experience satisfaction or dissatisfaction.”  Not only is this useless, common-sense trivia, of course they are either happy or not happy, but it also actually false in its oversimplification.  These two reactions are not the only two emotional states that consumers can have with a product or service.  There is actually a complex range of responses that consumers can have.  Here is another example from an exam:

Which of the following is not one of the sociological variables used to explain how families function?

a.

Cohesion

b.

Adaptability

c.

Communication

d.

Structure

e.

All of the above are sociological variables that can be used to explain how families function.

Let’s just move past the grammatical monstrosity of a question with the spelling error.  That’s just par for the course.  Instead, let’s look at the substance of the question. 

Now I have studied sociology extensively, and all four of these concepts are used by sociologists to study all types of social phenomenon, including families.  But “all of the above” was the wrong answer.  The “correct” answer was “structure,” which is false and non-sensical, as social structure is one of the most important and central concepts in sociology.  All sociologists study the structure of families to understand the function of families.  But, when you look at his PowerPoint slide, that word is NOT on the slide, so obviously it must be a “wrong” answer.

Oh, by the way, did you know that a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has meaning?  Few do.  Relevance?  None.  Usefulness?  None.  What’s the point?  Don’t ask such silly questions.  Just memorize whatever factoids you are told to memorize. 

And just to remind you, this was all from the HIGHEST RATED professor in the department based on student evaluation surveys.  This just goes so show you how utterly flawed and useless student surveys really are, which I discuss at length in my new book, The Myths of Measurement and Meritocracy: Why Accountability Metrics in Higher Education are Unfair and Increase Inequality.

As you can clearly see, knowledge, reason, critical thinking are the enemies of success at The Naveen Jindal School of Management and UT Dallas.  Don’t know.  Don’t think.  Don’t question.  Just listen, memorize, and regurgitate on a standardized test.

In this school, students are just supposed to memorize whatever meaningless generalizations the professor put on a PowerPoint.  What are the core skills being taught to students, other than memorization?   University of Texas at Dallas students have been carefully trained to select the “correct” answer on a multiple-choice exam. 

And I use the word “teach” very loosely because only one or two professors (out of over 20) actually “taught” students in any way, shape, or form. 

Most professors did only two activities.  First, they talked at students, but none of these professors had anything to say that was not already said in the textbook. 

Second, some professors quickly assigned numerical grades to assignments.  They did not really read or assess assignments, they just quickly attached a subjective number.  However, I said “some” professors on purpose, because most professors had a graduate student Teaching Assistant who did all the work for the class.

Finally, I want to briefly mention the curious phenomenon of “teamwork” at the University of Texas at Dallas.  Almost every assignment in almost every class, besides exams, were team assignments.  There was almost no individual assignments. 

Working is teams can be very valuable, and under the right circumstances, a team can be more productive, and produce higher quality work, than an individual produce alone.  But, under the wrong conditions, a team produces little and the quality of the work can be really low.  Even worse, one or two people can end up doing all the work, placing unnecessary stress on higher performing students. Furthermore, productive, high-performing groups do not simply “happen,” they must be created and nurtured over time with the proper resources and environmental conditions.

Psychologist Benjamin Schneider has argued that “people make the place,” by which he meant that the abilities, personalities, and motivation of people largely determine the success of an organization or group (qtd. in Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006, p. 86).  Thus, to achieve capable working groups who will successfully reach goals, you need to have the best people with quality resources. 

There is some empirical research, which backs up this notion (p. 87).  Michael Schrage, research fellow at MIT, expressed this notion slightly differently: “A collaboration of incompetents, no matter how diligent or well-meaning, cannot be successful” (qtd. in Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006, p. 90).  Tom Kelley, one of the founders and general manager of IDEO, argued in his book The Art of Innovation that team members have to be “selected for ability” in order to maximize the contribution of each member to the group.  Kelley also argued that group members need to have the freedom and autonomy to choose their groups, projects, and roles (p. 75). 

However, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, management professors at Stanford, argued that the natural talent argument for success is only half-true because talent is not a fixed quality. They explained, “Exceptional performance depends heavily on experience and effort.  No matter how gifted (or ordinary) team members are to start out, the more experience they have working together, the better their teams do…Experienced teams perform better, because over time members come to trust each other more, communicate more effectively, and learn to blend each other’s diverse skills, strengths, and weaknesses” (p. 94). 

Pfeffer and Sutton also point out that “people’s performance depends on the resources they have to work with, including the help they get from colleagues, and the infrastructure that supports their work” (p. 96).  In short, as Tom Kelley explained, “there’s an art to putting teams together” (p. 83).  Successful teams don’t simply happen.  They must be created and nurtured. 

That is why a lot of teams are not only ineffective, as political scientist Cass R. Sunstein and psychologist Reid Hastie (2015) have pointed out, but also much worse at making decisions than individuals.  Groups often fail to correct and thereby “amplify” the mistakes each member to create a worse outcome than if people worked alone (p. 13).

At UT Dallas, every group that I was assigned to was both inefficient and ineffective.  I would have accomplished a lot more, with higher quality and less time, if I would have been allowed to work on my own. 

None of the professors at The Naveen Jindal School of Management had never heard of the art and craft of forming teams and leading effective teamwork.  Never did any professor discuss the principles and practices that make teams effective, or the pitfalls to avoid.  The business school professors at UT Dallas simply took random people and threw them together into groups. 

And not once did any professor ever monitor or evaluate the performance of any team.  They didn’t care.  Professors simply graded the final assignment.  Sometimes teams were asked to evaluate each other with a grade, but this exercise simply rewarded popularity and conformity. 

In most of my classes, there were many group members who were grossly incompetent and lacking in even the basic motivation to contribute anything at all.  In several classes when students were put into working groups, many students said nothing and contributed nothing.  Almost all of the work was done hastily days before an assignment was due. 

In every class, the stronger and more motivated students did most of the work, including all of the scheduling, task assignment, communication, and monitoring of group work.  This made group work much easier than individual work for lower performing students, and it made group work much, much harder and more work for higher performing students.

And why did we do so much group work?  Almost every professor will pay lip-service to the intellectual importance of teams and their practical use in the workplace.  But that is not why groups are used.  That is simply a rationalization.

If professors cared about the concept and practice of teamwork then they would actually devote time and effort to teach the subject.  They would monitor its practice, and evaluate students as they learned to work in groups.  But that NEVER happened.  Not even once.

No, there is only ONE reason why groups are used.  It saves professors time and effort.  Professors are lazy.  Why grade 30 or 60 or 90 assignments when you can quickly grade 5 or 10?  It’s simple, self-serving math.  Again, at The Naveen Jindal School of Management, the institution serves itself, not students or society.

In closing, here is the most important lesson I learned at business school: I could have gotten the same information by reading books at a fraction of the cost, about $1000 instead of over $40,000 – and I wouldn’t have been subjected to meaningless, subjective numbers that supposedly judged my “learning” or “knowledge.”  Plus, I would have been able to learn useful information that I wanted to learn.

As a customer, I was very “dissatisfied” by this dumbed-down curriculum delivered by no-nothing, lazy instructors. 

In fact, I was insulted.  This wasn’t an education.  It was a meaningless institutional ritual. 

Or worse, it was fraud. 

I was spending over $40,000 dollars to be force-fed bullshit, questionable generalizations, and falsehoods by professors who didn’t give a damn about my learning or providing students with a useful education.

I know I shouldn’t have, but I took all of this personally. 

I love to learn so much, and I care a great deal about teaching and the process of education.  Thus, my consumer experience at The Naveen Jindal School of Management and UT Dallas was a mix of rage, disgust, disappointment. 

I also experienced a great deal of apathy.  I hated the fraudulent classroom experience.  I was utterly demoralized because there was nothing that I could do to change it, other than document my experience by writing this essay.

But it wasn’t all bad.  As a lifelong learner, I can honestly say that I learned a great deal during my tragic experience at UT Dallas.  I learned all that I have put into this essay, which hopefully will help others make better decisions about graduate school one day.  But I also learned a great deal about business management, marketing, and economics – from the several hundred interesting books I read while ignoring my ignorant professors.  I gave myself the education I wanted and deserved, as I have always done for decades. 

The diploma I earned from UT Dallas signified useless ritualized bullshit.  My real learning was never acknowledged by any institution or solemnized by any piece of paper.  Such is the tragedy of playing school, as I have written about in my new books.

Tradition or Transformation?

Business management consultants B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore published a groundbreaking book in 1999 with Harvard Business Review Press, which was called The Experience Economy.  They argued that advanced economies in the 21st century would be defined by “experiences,” rather than commodities, goods, or services. 

In the 21st century, consumers want a new level of value that creates rich experiences that transforms them into new and better human beings (p. 268).  Pine and Gilmore explained, “The experiences we have affect who we are, what we can accomplish, and where we are going, and we increasingly ask companies to stage experiences that change us” (p. 242), although this business model has been the modus operandi of educational institutions for thousands of years. 

Good ideas take a while to break into the C-suite, or the business school classroom.

When businesses focus on experiences and transformations, the customer “is the product,” as they are telling a business, “Change me” (p. 255).  The “transformation economy,” that Pine and Gilmore describe, as any educator would recognize, is the learning economy or the education economy, which was first systematically described by the philosopher John Dewey over a century ago.  Good ideas take a while to break into the consulting business as well.

For thousands of years, educators have been in the business of educating and transforming their students into capable adults who had the knowledge and the skills to survive and thrive.  But you don’t often find education in most schools, as I’ve written about extensively, especially in my two most recent books.

While Pine and Gilmore focused on heralding the new experience economy, they also warned about complacent businesses that do not care about consumers or their needs.  These traditional, old-school businesses operate with “an attitude of ‘They won’t mind,’” which leads “inevitably to operational practices replete with customer sacrifice” (p. 123). 

The Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas is one of those thoughtless, traditional businesses that deliver sub-standard, flawed products because they simply don’t care about their customers.  The professors at this school also know that the largely ignorant consumers who buy their shoddy product “won’t mind” because they can’t recognize the low quality of the services being offered, or at least are two powerless and afraid to complain because they know their professors will retaliate with lower grades.

It's interesting that Pine and Gilmore should quote at length an article by John Quelch, a former Dean at the London Business School, who wrote,

“We’re not in the education business.  We’re in the transformation business.  We expect everyone who participates in a program at the London School of Business – whether it’s for three days or for two years – to be transformed by the experience.  We want people to look back on their time here as something that significantly influence their career and possible their entire life…everyone here – from the custodians to deputy deans – has become much more motivated.  People are eager to take part in having an impact on the students who come here” (qtd. in Pine & Gilmore, 1999, p. 248).

Pine and Gilmore argue that business and organizations that focus on the transformation of customers, not just selling a product or service, requires leaders who are willing to “sacrifice their own needs in favor of the employees,” and also for employees who are willing to “sacrifice their needs in order to eliminate the sacrifice of the customers” (p. 269).  A transformation-focused organization seeks to offer customized and “truly engaging” experiences for customers who will get a “one-to-one relationship” with the organization (p. 285).

Now I agree that this all sounds quite idealistic.  However, an ideal, as the educational philosopher John Dewey once pointed out, is more of an orientation, not a destination.  An ideal is a direction one walks toward, like north, but never reaches.

Thus, the truly engaging, experiential organization that offers life-changing transformation is an idealization that is more fiction than fact.  But it is a worthy goal to strive for, especially for educational organizations who should be in the business of establishing personal relationships with students and seeking to transform their lives.

It’s sad that there so many schools like The Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas, which offers an out-of-date, depersonalized, and largely useless curriculum.  At UT Dallas, factoids are pushed into the passive minds of sheep who simply follow commands and do what they are told by arrogant professors who could care less about teaching, let alone transforming students.

One of the best business management books that was ever written was published in 2006 by Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton.  It was called Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management.  It’s speaks volumes that at The Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas this book was never even mentioned in any class, let alone assigned as a textbook. 

That is because schools like The Naveen Jindal School of Management and UT Dallas, and at other schools I’ve taught at in Texas, don’t care about evidence, best-practices, or even basic levels of educational professionalism.  These schools are all mindless, rigid, soulless, bureaucratic machines that offer a single, one-size-fits-all mold that stamp out credit hours, course grades, and diplomas. 

No learning required.  No growth.  No transformation. 

In The Knowing-Doing Gap, Stanford management professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton argued that real, useful knowledge is “acquired from learning by doing” rather than from “learning by reading, listening, or even thinking” (p. 6).  Most schools, including most institutions of higher education, don’t know how to produce real learning.  They can only produce the fake, superficial type of knowledge that is easily memorized and regurgitated on a test and then is forgotten not long after.  This is a useless, trivial form of knowledge, if it can even be called knowledge.

Can the Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas, or any of the other schools mentioned above, be reformed into an educational institution that seeks to actually educate and transform students? 

Not likely. 

Not now, anyway.  Probably not ever.

Why not?

Because, as Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton argued in The Knowing-Doing Gap, almost all of the professors and all of the administrators at the Naveen Jindal School of Management suffer from the delusion that “talking about something” is “equivalent to actually doing something.”  The essence of ineffectual schooling is simply talk, talk, talk and no actual doing of anything useful or important (p. 48).

No one should pay $40,000 or $200,000 for empty, useless talk from a bunch of arrogant hypocrites who do not, and probably cannot, practice what they preach.

Can We Learn from Failure?

Most organizations also suffer from the “smart talk trap,” as Pfeffer and Sutton documented.  Universities, in particular suffer, from this dreaded disease.  Almost all professors simply talk and talk and talk and assume that somehow all the talk seeps into students’ brains.  Professors also assume that all that talk is understood and remembered by students.  And further, somehow all that talk enables students to actually do something useful, especially something useful on a job. 

All of these assumptions are false.  Smart talk doesn’t help anyone do anything useful, other than puff up the ego of the person doing all the talking.  Nobody is really listening or knows what to do with all that talk.

But hey, that’s what the research shows.  But who actually cares about research and best practices?  Certainly not most university faculty when it comes to teaching, or university administrators when it comes to the fostering high quality educational practices.

As Pfeffer and Sutton pointed out back in 2006, “many companies and leaders show little interest in subjecting their business practices and decisions to the same scientific rigor they would use for technical or medial issues (p. 12).  Instead, most organizational leaders, including university presidents, deans, and faculty, simply act on “beliefs rooted in ideology or in cultural values,” which “resist disconfirming evidence and persist in affecting judgments and choice, regardless of whether or not they are true” (p. 12). 

I’ve never seen, and rarely heard about, an educational leader at a university, college, or community college who cared about evidence and best-practices, and who was committed to institutional change and actually serving students.  Some certainly talked-the-talk, but none cared or dared to do anything substantial, partly because the personal, institutional, political, and economic costs are simply too great, and the consequences too uncertain.

Jeremy Rifkin is a bestselling author and Lecturer at the Wharton School’s Executive Education Program.  In his 2014 book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, he argued that technological advances were causing “the pedagogy of learning” to undergo “a radical overhaul.”  Rifkin criticized traditional forms of modern schooling for transforming the school classroom into “a microcosm of the factory” with “authoritarian, top-down models of instruction.” 

He explained, “Students were thought of as analogous to machines.  They were conditioned to follow commands, learn by repetition, and perform efficiently.  The teacher was akin to a factory foreman, handing out standardized assignments that required set answers in a given time frame.  Learning was compartmentalized into isolated silos” (pp. 133-34).  Rifkin naively believed that technology was ushering in an educational utopia, largely through the development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which Rifken thought were going to revolutionize education.  

But MOOCs didn’t revolutionize schooling.  In fact, as educational historians have pointed out for over half a century, nothing has ever revolutionized schooling, as I have discussed in a pair of recent books.  In the 21st century, schools operate pretty much like they did in the 19th century, if not the 17th century.

Rifkin’s critical summary of old-fashioned 19th century schooling is still a valid description of what goes on in most schools in most countries in the year 2021, two decades into the 21st century.  And most likely, the factory model of authoritarian schooling will be going strong in the 22nd century too.

The Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas still operates based on this outdated 19th century authoritarian model, as do most graduate schools around the world.  The Naveen Jindal School of Management delivers a traditional useless, formulaic, and ritualistic form of schooling that promotes conformity, mindless obedience to authority, and the ranking of students based on jumping through arbitrary academic hoops.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t collectively learn from the failures of The Naveen Jindal School of Management.  That is my hope at least. 

Professor of civil engineering and historian Henry Petroski explained in his book Success through Failure that “The most successful improvements ultimately are those that focus on the limitations - on the failures...Though a focus on failure can lead to success, too great a reliance on successful precedents can lead to failure” (p. 3).  In You’re About To Make a Terrible Mistake, business management professor Olivier Sibony has argued that professionals should study “worst practices” rather than “best practices” so as to better understand why most organizations fail.  When people focus on winners, they neglect the majority of organizations “who took the same risks, adopted the same behaviors” but still failed (p. 46).

Most business school professors would be doing their students a big favor if they focused more on failure, especially the failure of students to learn what they are being asked to learn in school.  Failure is the best teacher.  Learning through failure imparts the best lessons.

Petroski argues that truly innovative people “see failures where most of us see only successes.  These are the inventors, the engineers, the designers of the world, who are forever trying to improve it through the things in it…a failure of any kind is not so much a disappointment as an opportunity.  They tweak the things we know to turn them into things we did not even know that we needed…They recognize that a failure not only provides them the opportunity to carry out the process of design and development anew but also enables them to conceive of something new and improved to obviate the triggering failure” (pp. 62-63).

The Naveen Jindal School of Management is a failure because it fails to educate its students in any meaningful and practical way.  It also fails society by depriving the business community of truly educated and empowered entrepreneurs and managers. 

But most other business schools have the same kinds of sinking ships, as management professor Henry Mintzberg demonstrated almost twenty years ago in his book Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development.  Most business schools, as Mintzberg pointed out, offer an “IKEA model” of education: “The schools supply the pieces, neatly cut to size; the students do the assembly.  Unfortunately, the schools don’t supply instructions.  Worse still, the pieces don’t fit together” (p. 37).  And in the case of schools like The Naveen Jindal School of Management, it gets even worse: The pieces are cheap, broken, and made from generic, substandard materials.  The University of Texas at Dallas sells counterfeit goods.

I learned a great deal while I was enrolled in this terrible school, just not very much in the classroom.  Grouch Marx once quipped, “I find television very educating.  Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”  When I was enrolled at the Naveen Jindal School of Management, I spent most of my class time ignoring my professors and instead reading the articles and books of more knowledgeable and competent scholars, like W. Edwards Deming, Jeffry Pfeffer, Robert Sutton, Peter M. Senge, Wayne Baker, and Amy C. Edmondson, to name just a few.

I learned relatively little, often nothing, in most of my classes.  Much of the information that I was forced to memorize short-term for tests were meaningless, useless, and sometimes, utter nonsense.  Almost nothing of value came from my professors or my classes, although a couple of the textbooks had valid information that was useful. 

To be honest, I had a better education in business management reading The Economist magazine for 25 years than earning my MBA at the University of Texas at Dallas. 

Herbert Simon was a Nobel Prize winning economist and professor of sociology and business management.  He wrote in his memoirs, Models of My Life, “Anything that can be learned by a normal American adult on a trip to a foreign country (of less than one year’s duration) can be learned more quickly, cheaply, and easily by visiting the San Diego Public Library.”

I would modify Simon’s assessment for those of you thinking about going to graduate school, especially for an MBA.  You can get a better education more quickly, cheaply, and easily by reading the right books and articles by the leading scholars, and by reading The Economist magazine every week.

The Naveen Jindal School of Management and its faculty do not care about students or student learning because the school does not care about education or teaching.  This organization does not care about the sacred, transformational process of learning, nor does it care about the powerful impact a real educational experience can have on students and the world at large. 

At my core, I am an unrepentant idealist who cares a great deal about teaching, learning, the value of education, and contributing positively to the world.  Thus, I have been utterly demoralized while I’ve been at The Naveen Jindal School of Management.  It is a terrible school.

I hope that some members of this school will read this essay, pause, and think deeply about why they work in the field of education.  I hope that some faculty will reflect on what they hope to accomplish besides earning a paycheck and publishing academic articles that few will ever read, and that fewer people will ever use in any productive endeavor. 

Failure is a powerful teacher, if there is an openness and willingness to learn.  I hope that the professors of this school can learn from their failure and do better.

But I doubt it.  I seriously doubt any change will happen at this institution.  Here’s why.

Entrepreneur and venture capitalist Ben Horowiz has talked about the many differences between good organizations and bad organizations.  One of the key distinctions is the ability of management to listen to front-line workers and customers in order to recognize and learn from organizational failures.  Bad organizations not only don’t recognize or learn from failures, they usually ignore all criticisms and pretend nothing is wrong.

In The Hard Thing about Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, Ben Horowitz explains, “To make it all much worse and rub salt in the wound, when they finally work up the courage to tell management how fucked-up their situation is, management denies there is a problem, then defends the status quo, then ignores the problem” (p. 101). 

I expect my report on the failures of The Naveen Jindal School of Management to meet a similar fate.  Most likely, my concerns will be completely ignored, and new generations of students will have to suffer like I have suffered, passing through more useless rituals of schooling without any real benefits.

Sara and Jack Gorman wrote a great book, Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts that Will Save Us, which helps to explain why both individuals and organizations, like the Naveen Jindal School of Management, will never change, no matter what the facts are. 

For one, understanding the facts about what is really going on rarely changes anyone’s mind.  “Irrational behavior occurs even when we know and understand all the facts,” Gorman and Gorman explained (p. 6).  While I know that most professors in the department have a “knowledge deficit” about teaching and learning, the root of the problem is that faculty just don’t care to “put in the time and effort” (p. 13) to educate themselves about the proper way to educate their students, let alone spend the countless hours needed to engage in educational practices both inside and outside of the classroom.

More importantly, many faculty either don’t believe that teaching and student learning is important, or they believe in false and outdated tractional myths about schooling, or some combination of the two.  Overcoming divergent values, apathy, and engrained myths is very hard, and often impossible.  As Gorman and Gorman wrote, “at present we are not certain how best to convince people that there are scientific facts involved…and that ignoring them has terrible consequences” (p. 26). 

Management professor Richard P. Rumelt wrote a wonderful book called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters, which was one of the best management books that I’ve ever read (and never once mentioned by any professor in The Naveen Jindal School of Management.  He explained how most organizations have no focus and no strategy, which is why so many organizations fail to be productive and achieve objectives.  Instead of creating clear, coordinated, and logical strategy, most organizations operate based on “ritualized formalism,” which achieves little (p. 43). 

From what I experienced, The Naveen Jindal School of Management is clearly a failed organization that is wholly based on ritualized formalism, which is utterly useless to students.  It is the exact opposite of a successful organization. 

Ironically, I can remember an accounting class that I had at UT Dallas, which actually turned out to require a bit more independent and critical thought than almost any other class I took.  We read about a failed company called MiniScribe, which was led by a blustering idiot who forced his staff to memorize his silly management philosophy and ruled by naked authority and fear, which caused his staff to frequently inflate sales numbers and cook the books – which eventually led to the company’s downfall.

Exactly the same sort of failed management practices demonstrated by almost every professor and Dean at The Naveen Jindal School of Management, except at UT Dallas there are no independent auditors and there is no market accountability, so nothing will ever change or get better at this failed organization, just like at so many other educational institutions and non-profits with no customer responsiveness and little external oversight.

Richard P. Rumelt sardonically explained that “business schools teach strategy but rarely apply the concept to themselves” (p. 112).  You could extend this insightful analysis and say that business schools, and many other professional degree programs in every university, teach important concepts and practices, but they rarely actually practice what they preach, and they never actually check to see if their verbiage ever translate into actual results that make the world a better place. 

I believe that is called hypocrisy, or fraud. 

Both are endemic to higher education in America, as well as to many non-profit organizations and for-profit firms.  As many educational and business management professors have documented, there is so much useless bullshit at the core of both academia and business.

I contacted several journalists to see about publishing this story.  None of them were interested, in part because none of them saw what I described as a problem.  It was just reality, or rather a blizzard of subjective reality.  One reporter at the Washington post suggested that there was no way to objectively gauge the “quality of learning” in college and that “different people” would find different experiences acceptable.  This reporter also suggested that most students “don’t have the time or will to investigate” university programs, thus, nobody will care about my warnings and it probably will not deter any students from enrolling in The Naveen Jindal School of Management. 

This reporter’s simple and naive solution: transfer to another school.

I looked into transferring to another MBA program, but is much harder to transfer as a graduate student, and often it is impossible.  Many programs do not except transfers, especially the best programs.  And when you do change from one graduate program to another, few of your credits will actually transfer, so it is basically starting from scratch, a very costly proposition in terms of time and. Money, which is not a good option for most people.

While my MBA experience was bad, I wasn’t all that surprised.

Unfortunately, poor quality and the lack of authentic educational value extends throughout higher education. What I found in the business school of the University of Texas at Dallas can be seen across higher education at large.  I’ve taught at top-level research universities, non-selective state universities, small liberal arts colleges, and community colleges.  I saw the same dumbed-down-teach-to-the-test curriculum and the cynical practice of playing school at every school I worked out, except for one, a very expensive liberal arts college.  There is also a large body of research on the lack of “higher education” in institutions of higher education, including in Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana’s award winning book From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession.

Donald Levine, former Dean of the University of Chicago, once lamented, “The scandal of higher education in our time is that so little attention gets paid, in institutions that claim to provide an education, to what it is that college educators claim to be providing.” 

I’ve spent 11 years as a college student, and over 20 years as a lecturer in higher education, and I can tell you that most colleges don’t provide much of value to students, especially in terms of learning practical knowledge and useful skills.  Most colleges are good at giving students fun social experiences, like football games and parties.  But I’ve rarely seen an institution of higher education that actually cared about students’ learning or goals, let alone giving them a “higher education” that will improve their lives.  This is why some critics of higher education, like Kevin Carey at New America, have described college as a “scam,” especially expensive master’s degree programs, which are rarely connected to actual jobs.[15]

So, if you’re interested in real learning, instead of looking at rankings, do your due diligence. We live in a twisted world where students have to “search for evidence” on institutions of higher education in order to keep from “getting ripped off” by fraudulent scams,[16] like the MBA program at The Naveen Jindal School of Management. 

So here is some advice.  Visit the school.  Talk to professors and current students.  Ask them about the quality of learning in the classrooms.  And dig into the research of professors to find one that writes about what you want to learn.  You can tell a lot about the quality of a teacher by reading their work and listening to them talk. 

You might also read about the pitfalls of grad school from other sources, especially Henry Mintzberg’s book Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development.  He not only criticizes MBA programs, but also argues that these college programs are counterproductive for businesses because MBA programs produce ignorant and ineffective “managers” who can’t actually manage well.  In The Knowing-Doing Gap, Stanford management professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton argued over 20 years ago that “There is little evidence that being staffed with people who have an advanced education in business is consistently related to outstanding organizational performance” (p. 3).

And above all else, understand the true purpose of higher education in the 21st century, which I explained in my recent book, The Myths of Measurement and Meritocracy: Why Accountability Metrics in Higher Education Are Unfair and Increase Inequality.  You go to college to buy a credential, not to earn an education.  In fact, Mintzberg discussed this issue twenty years before I did in his Managers Not MBAs, and the sociologist Randal Collins documented this phenomenon over forty years ago in his book The Credential Society. 

An MBA, as Mintzberg pointed out, “is not a process of educating so much as a method of screening.  The MBA is a convenient credential to justify hiring choices” (p. 83).  Business schools are just “expensive employment agencies,” according to economist Samuelson (quoted in Mintzberg, p. 83).  Business schools are like “bottling plants,” business professor Richard West explained, where the “product is about 90% done before we ever get it.  We put it in a bottle and we label it” (quoted in Mintzberg, p. 83).  This is why MBA graduates get “little value” from their degree, which is mostly a “selection mechanism” for the employment market rather than a badge of human capital development.[17]

And even worse, as business professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Christina Fong demonstrated in their 2002 journal article “The End of Business Schools? Less Success Than Meets the Eye,” most MBA graduates don’t get rewarded in the labor market when they graduate with their fancy certified label.  There are almost no economic gains for most students.  Only the few students who manage to graduate from elite, top-ranked programs see improved labor market returns. 

Most students graduate with no real knowledge, no real skills, and a lot of debt.

I paid about $45,000 for my credential.  I now have my MBA.  Its official.

But as for my real business management education?  It only cost about $2,500 for the books I bought on Amazon, and the time it spent to read them. 

 NOTES:

[1] https://news.utdallas.edu/campus-community/jsom-bloomberg-rankings-2021/; https://www.bloomberg.com/business-schools/

[2] https://news.utdallas.edu/campus-community/best-value-princeton-review-2021/

[3] https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/best-value?schoolName=University+of+Texas+at+Dallas&_mode=table

[4] Diep, F., & Gluckman, N.  (2021, Sept 13).  Colleges still obsess over national rankings.  For proof, look at their strategic plans.  The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Retrieved www.chronicle.com

[5] Chandler, D. L.  (2021, July 16).  “Malcom Gladwell Examines Why HBCUs Score So Low in U.S. News & World Report College Rankings.”  The Grio.  Retrieved from www.thegrio.com.  To listen to the podcast see: Gladwell, Malcom.  (2021).  “Lord of the Rankings.”  Revisionist History.  Retrieved from https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/lord-of-the-rankings/

[6] Driver, C.  (2022).  Breaking ranks: How the ranking industry rules higher education and what to do about it.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

[7] Surluga, S.  (2022, July 1).  Columbia to skip U.S. News rankings after professor questioned data.  The Washington Post.  Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com

[8] Carey, K.  (2021, Nov 5).  The college degree is in shambles.  The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Retrieved from www.chronicle.com; Weissmann, J.  (2021, July 16).  Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education.  Slate.  Retrieved from www.slate.com/business.  See also Bannon, L., & Fuller, A., (2021, Nov 9).  UCS pushed a $115,000 online degree.  Graduates got low salaries, huge debts.  The Wall Street Journal.  Retrieved from www.wsj.com

[9] Pfeffer, J., & Fong, C. (2002). The end of business schools? Less success than meets the eye. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 1, 78-95. See also: Pfeffer & Fong (2004), The business school “business”” Some lessons from the U.S. experience. Journal of Management Studies, 41(8), 1501-1520.

[10] Quoted in Resse, W. J.  (2013).  Testing wars in the public schools: A forgotten history.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 136, 202.

[11] Ibid, 202.

[12] Ibid, 202.

[13] Kridel, C., & Bullough, Jr., R. V.  (2007).  Stories of the Eight-Year Study: Re-examining Secondary Education in America.  Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 145.

[14] Ross, L., & Nisbett, R. E.  (2011).  The person and the situation: Perspective of social psychology.  Revised Ed.  London: Pinter & Martin.

[15] Carey, K.  (2021, Nov 5).  The college degree is in shambles.  The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Retrieved from www.chronicle.com; Weissmann, J.  (2021, July 16).  Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education.  Slate.  Retrieved from www.slate.com/business.  See also Bannon, L., & Fuller, A., (2021, Nov 9).  UCS pushed a $115,000 online degree.  Graduates got low salaries, huge debts.  The Wall Street Journal.  Retrieved from www.wsj.com.  See also Beach, J. M. (2021).  The myths of measurement and meritocracy: Why accountability metrics in higher education are unfair and increase inequality.  Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

[16] Carey, K.  (2021, Nov 5).  The college degree is in shambles.  The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Retrieved from www.chronicle.com

https://www.aacsb.edu/accredited/t/the-university-of-texas-at-dallas

[17] Moldoveanu, M. C., & Martin, R. L.  (2008). The future of the MBA: Designing the thinker of the future. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4.