The book "Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education," co-authored by Stanford's Thomas Ehrlich and Anne Colby along with two other scholars, was recently recognized as being the best book of the year on liberal arts education.
A book by two Stanford Graduate School of Education scholars was recently awarded the 2013 Frederick W. Ness Award by the Association of American Colleges & Universities. The award is given to the best book of the year on liberal education.
Thomas Ehrlich, a visiting professor at the GSE, and Anne Colby, a consulting professor at Stanford affiliated with the GSE's Center on Adolescence, co-authored Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession with William Sullivan, senior scholar at the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College and Jonathan R. Dolle of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
A national study of business education by the Carnegie Foundation showed most undergraduate programs fail to educate students in how business fits into a broader cultural context. The programs failed to challenge students to think creatively or challenge assumptions.
Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education looks at the response to these findings: the initiatives that a wide range of universities are undertaking to augment their business curriculums with the best elements of the liberal arts. The authors found that even in high-quality programs students often say they were focused solely on business practices, not factoring in the values of the greater community.
“Too often undergraduate business programs fail to prepare graduates to understand deeply what their lives could be about in any full sense or what their places should be in the world around them,” the authors note. “As a result, they are not adequately prepared to be leaders in business or to gain full satisfaction in their personal and civic lives.”
This year’s Ness award winner was selected by a committee of higher education leaders including Ken Ruscio, president of Washington and Lee University; Sean Decatur, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Oberlin College; Brian Murphy, president of De Anza College; and Elsa Núñez, president of Eastern Connecticut State University.
The Ness book award was established by AAC&U in 1979 to honor AAC&U's president emeritus, Frederic W. Ness. Recent award winners include Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past by Sam Wineburg, who is a professor at the GSE; Why Choose the Liberal Arts? by Mark W. Roche; Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education by Peter Sacks; Our Underachieving Colleges by Derek Bok; Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money by James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield; Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi; and Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education by Martha Nussbaum.
For the AAC&U’s news release announcing the award, please visit http://www.aacu.org/press_room/press_releases/2013/nessaward.cfm.
© Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.
