Finally, what do you see as the emerging trends in business education and how is your institution adapting to these? Delphine Manceau “For me, the first trend concerns innovation – in terms of both content and pedagogical approaches. We are still in the post‑Covid period where we learned so much about remote teaching and learning, but now students want to be on-site and to interact in-person with their peers and faculty. It’s about reinventing the optimal combination of remote and face-to-face teaching and how to use generative AI to stimulate learning and assess students. “In a world where they will most likely use AI in their jobs, we need to help students understand and use such tools in a productive way. We need to include these new topics and tools in what we teach as well as how we teach. Higher education is reinventing itself these days because this will change the way people work in companies, so we need to prepare students for that. “The second trend is about social responsibility, inclusivity, EDI topics and ethics. We’ve been talking for many years about training responsible leaders; it’s now even more important. Of course, the geopolitical environment also pushes us to question the way we train responsible leaders – and the students are pushing us too. “The third and major trend, at least in France where we have a lot of standalone business schools, as opposed to institutions that are part of universities, involves working more with other schools on developing cross-disciplinary programmes and research. We are specifically looking at how to combine the disciplines of technology, data, life sciences and philosophy with business.”
“As the chair of AMBA, I’ve been actively looking into getting more women on accreditation panels and this is something that [the association] does pretty well. I think about 30 per cent of members on peer review teams are currently women but that can – and probably should – go higher. I was accrediting a very good school about a year and a half ago; at the end of it, the female participants said it was the first time they’d ever had some of these issues about gender and bias raised. It’s not to say no man would ever do that, but I think the more women we can get on to panels, the more these kinds of discussions can be had.” Catherine Duggan “Over the past few years we’ve significantly increased the proportion of women in our faculty. One of the simplest but most important approaches has been to make sure that we’re being very proactive when we hire – not just advertising, but looking through our networks, reaching out to colleagues and making sure that we are inviting people to apply. Several of our most successful recent female hires have emphasised how important this type of invitation was to their decision to apply and, ultimately, join the school. “I think we also need to be very careful about who is carrying the administrative load in our organisations – particularly, whether we are adequately tracking the full scope of work that goes into these roles. As deans, we think a lot about making sure women are taking up leadership roles within our schools, but we frequently fail to account for the fact that the requirements of leadership roles don’t always fall on everyone equally. “Female professors often field far more student requests for office hours than their male colleagues, while students (and on occasion faculty too) will sometimes approach female administrators with a larger volume of comparatively minor issues. In my experience, schools almost never track this additional work. “When we add these issues to the well-known problem of women being disproportionately assigned to committee work, it is hard to escape the conclusion that well-intentioned approaches are failing to provide adequate support for women and faculty of colour [as well as other minorities] – and this is something that ultimately risks derailing promising careers.” Marion Debruyne “My approach revolves around educating our students and how we can develop them to be people who flourish and thrive in a diverse world. For us, it’s not about mentoring female students, it’s about enabling all of our students – independent of who they are and what facets they bring to the table – to be able to thrive in a diverse environment. “All our degree programmes have, as part of the curriculum, a DEI track that all the students must follow. This also includes an experiential part so all students are
involved in developing a solution to the challenge of creating a more diverse work environment, enabling everybody to live up to their full potential.”
18 | Ambition | MAY 2024
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