I don’t know if the writer, Lane Wallace, or a New York Times editor came up with the headline — Multicultural Critical Theory. At Business School? — but it’s terribly misleading:
Learning how to think critically — how to imaginatively frame questions and consider multiple perspectives — has historically been associated with a liberal arts education, not a business school curriculum, so this change represents something of a tectonic shift for business school leaders. Mr. Martin even describes his goal as a kind of “liberal arts M.B.A.”“The liberal arts desire,” he says, is to produce “holistic thinkers who think broadly and make these important moral decisions. I have the same goal.”
Ever since 1959, when two influential studies by the Ford and Carnegie Foundations chastised business schools as being too vocational, most M.B.A. programs have taken anything but a broad approach to their subject matter.
With few exceptions, traditional instruction has involved separate disciplines like finance, marketing and strategy, with an emphasis on quantifiable analyses and methods. While some valued what a liberal arts background could provide, the dominant view was that those elements had no place in professional business schools.
But even before the financial upheaval last year, business executives operating in a fast-changing, global market were beginning to realize the value of managers who could think more nimbly across multiple frameworks, cultures and disciplines. The financial crisis underscored those concerns — at business schools and in the business world itself.
Historically, a liberal arts education was the education proper to a free man — grammar, rhetoric, logic, etc. — not an education in liberal political thought — like the multicultural critical theory of the headline.