The (Business) World According to Julian Schuster

Schuster describes the other business schools in Minnesota as “huge ocean liners that need hours, days, even years to change course.” Hamline, on the other hand, is “a perfect laboratory,” a small university as quick to reposition as a yacht.

One way Hamline hopes to reflect this nimbleness is by offering courses where students study the ever-changing ethical landscape in the business world. To be sure, Hamline isn’t breaking new ground by including ethics in its business curriculum. According to Robert Morse, director of data and research at U.S. News & World Report, MBA programs across America in the wake of Enron have touted themselves as the moral alternative to standard accounting and management.

“People are looking for ethical choices,” Morse says. “But there’s a great deal of skepticism about whether it’s really being done. There’s a difference between advertising and course content. And the question is out there: Can you really, with a few courses, change people’s behavior?”

Schuster’s ideas extend beyond a few courses. “Our program is unique because it is fully integrated among the disciplines,” he says, adding that Hamline students “will take a variety of classes to achieve various competencies such as strategic thinking, administration, environmental sensitivity, and multicultural practices. This is not just a mixing and matching of courses—it is a holistic approach to education.” This approach, Schuster believes, will transcend what he sees as a narrowly siloed approach to business education.

“In an age when a high-school student in Albania can have the same base of information as a chief executive officer in Minneapolis, the wiser business decisions are no longer rooted in the access to information, but in the use of information,” he says. “The creative use of information is always based on a proper understanding of the past and the present, and an ability to envision the future.” A knowledge of history, literature, art, and science can “foster imagination, which will enable us to break familiar routines and to look for creative solutions.”

Literature in particular can do much to bring this about. “Nothing is more relevant for today’s business than our ability to communicate, foster relationships, and set up expectations,” Schuster says. “Reading Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, or Chekhov will not give us ready-made solutions for the business challenges of the day. It will, however, force us to use our imagination and look for the answers hidden in the web of complexities of human interactions, transactions, and desires.”

Schuster acknowledges that “we cannot create a society of good people overnight. But humans are social beings, and the basic traits of the liberal education will instill in our students a sense of morality and innovative thinking. This is our only hope if we want things to change.”