Some years ago, a YouTube video featuring a completely drunken Wharton MBA student trying to do a case study on the Gillette company made everyone appalled at the very thought of such behavior being not just a Wharton follies joke, but an indicator of what MBA student culture really implies.
Yelling obscenities on camera, over-the-top drinking, sometimes even sexual harassment has become a stereotype for male MBA student culture at leading business schools.
Being just a joke, this video does show us some truth – for instance, there was a real story when a president of a student fun show at Harvard was punished for bringing alcoholic drinks to the campus. Also, at the same time sexual assault on a woman by a fellow male student was reported. Though it happened off-campus, it shows that MBA student culture is not all diligent studying and equality between peers.
After that unhappy event, an investigation was bound to happen. Administrators acknowledged that such disgusting behavior was not out of question on the Harvard campus. Students have reported their colleagues playing insulting games (like the popular TV show game “Kill, Fuck, or Marry” when you have to choose three people you know and place them accordingly), or holding extremely sexist votes, such as men choosing the best breasts among their female counterparts at school.
According to Robin Ely, HBS associate dean for culture and community, learning of such activities on campus shocked and disgusted most of the teachers deeply. The dean said she’d heard about similar things going on in high schools, but not at universities. Her estimation is that such behavior is a rather alarming cultural issue.
Of course, we mustn’t think that only Harvard campuses can “boast” of such unhappy events: research including other b-schools confirmed that sexism and rude behavior is not exclusive to HBS.
A professor at one of America’s top business schools shared his thoughts on the matter and concluded that this ‘culture of male adolescents’ has become widely popular at many universities. According to him, the danger of such culture lies in excluding the majority of other students from the popular lists. Of course, groups such as married people, women and many foreigners would not be accepted into this ‘Wall Street culture reborn’. The sad thing is we cannot limit the popularity of such culture only to a handful of top schools.
For instance, Kellogg School of Management students were once caught excessively drunk at a Field Museum event in Chicago. Afterwards, it has become known that these students had smuggled a huge amount of alcoholic drinks into the museum using trash bins.
The report on this event says that many future MBAs appeared at the museum’s bar already drunk. Soon some of them started to vomit, others were throwing things at the exhibits and tried starting fights with other people present.
This proved most embarrassing for Kellogg School of Management, as the Field Museum refused to hold future events for the university, unless they provide sufficient security.
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