Who Defines Relevance?
It’s the group’s first recommendation, “Extend and augment AACSB accreditation guidelines to require schools to demonstrate the impact of faculty intellectual contribution to targeted audiences,” that has set some teeth on edge. Basically the group would ask B-schools to define a metric to demonstrate that people are actually applying or using the knowledge acquired in these research projects. For example, if a professor focuses his studies on improving accounting education, the school could measure his impact by looking at the number of people using his cases, textbooks, or other materials in the curriculum, according to the report. Some people fear that pushing for immediate relevance could deter researchers from studying uncharted or esoteric subjects. “We need to push boundaries and explore new frontiers of knowledge,” says John Sailors, assistant professor of marketing at the Opus College of Business at University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis. He also says that the choice of who i
