The (Business) World According to Julian Schuster

The war in Iraq was unnecessary. The United States is inflexible and no longer competitive in the global marketplace. Traditional business education divides people and teaches them to be “autistic” in their view of the world, ignorant of every field outside their own narrow expertise.

Julian Schuster is not afraid to say what he thinks.

“Business students and professionals need to stop reading that leadership crap”—popular books on business management that he maintains contain little that is useful—“and start reading the Russian classics: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov,” Schuster says. “We need to supply genuinely educated human beings to the work force. Ask an economist to comment on finance or management or diversity in the workplace, and it’s likely he won’t known any more than the guy who’s flipping hamburgers—maybe less.”

The opportunity to create a broader-based business curriculum is the reason why Schuster moved to Minnesota in 2006 and became dean of the Graduate School of Management at Hamline University, which in April was renamed the Hamline School of Business. He temporarily left his wife and son behind in Connecticut, where he had spent 16 years rising from assistant professor to dean of the School of Business at the University of New Haven.

“I knew we needed someone like Julian in order to establish a real foothold in the business community,” says Hamline President Linda Hanson. “He’s brilliant and he’s captivating. When Julian speaks, people tend to lean forward because they want to hear what funny thing will come next or [hear him] make some sort of statement about what everyone is thinking.”

Hanson, herself a recent transplant who came to Hamline from the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico in 2005, was launching a strategic plan designed to grow the university and significantly raise its profile. Schuster quickly became a part of this plan.

His mission is to develop something entirely new: a hybrid program combining business and liberal arts, which he believes will change business education in the Midwest, improve the relationship between academe and the business world, and eventually influence the national economy by providing leaders who bring a broad, ethical, well-informed worldview to the business world.

“It is our job to train this new generation of leaders to be different from the ones who were involved in fiascos such as Tyco and Enron,” Schuster says. “At Hamline, we have developed a holistic approach to business education—including moral reasoning, critical thinking, and accountability—that will produce innovative leaders and bring about a very necessary change.”