Harvard Business School has a fundamental problem, according to its dean. No, it’s not Blac Chyna’s fake admission letter to Harvard’s online business program.
Public trust has eroded in America’s capitalist system, said Nitin Nohria,
the dean of Harvard Business School. This is a major challenge for the renowned business school these days.
Nohria wants to address this underlying distrust in the U.S. economic framework.
“It’s really important for business to regain the trust of society,” he told The Harvard Crimson. “Harvard Business School needs to more proactively think about how to do that.”
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“We — as a school that has often been associated with business, which is closely associated with capitalism — need to ask, ‘what can we do to make sure that society’s trust in capitalism remains strong and can be rebuilt,’” Nohria said.
Nohria said they are moving to fix this problem by, for instance, offering more courses focused on ideas about economic structure.
“We are trying to find ways that we can engage our students in those kinds of conversations, all the way from having a second year course called ‘Reimagining Capitalism’ that has become one of our most successful second year electives, to now trying to bring that material back into the first year of our MBA curriculum,” he said.
Harvard Business School students aren’t the only ones who have lost faith in capitalism. A recent Gallup poll found that less than half of people in the 18 to 29-year-old age group had a positive view of capitalism in 2018. This is a 12 percentage point drop in the past two years.
Nohria noted this as well. “We’re now trying to ask the question, ‘how do we more seriously get engaged with the American heartland and think harder about parts of America that feel left behind?’ What we can do to bring more economic opportunity?” he said.
