cover image The Empire Builders: Inside the Harvard Business School

The Empire Builders: Inside the Harvard Business School

J. Paul Mark. William Morrow & Company, $0 (303pp) ISBN 978-0-688-06962-9

In a somewhat uncoordinated series of revealing episodes and unflattering personal profiles, former employee Mark here writes an expose of the Harvard Business School, whose MBAs constitute an elite power bloc in American finance and industry. Professors fatten their incomes, charges the author, with corporation consulting fees, competing fiercely for graduates to staff their consulting firms. Instructors using the ""case system'' for teaching business situations later use for their own projects research done by students, who themselves, through a professor's recommendation, may go on to starting salaries on Wall Street of $80,000 or more. Corporate managers, Mark maintains, sometimes establish faculty chairs on ``special'' subjects by making million-dollar contributions to the school, and ``associates,'' like IBM, which contribute to HBS programs, often become suppliers to the school. University president Derek Bok himself has expressed dissatisfaction with the school, according to the author. (October)