Transcript

When you're talking about where the faculty come from,  I think one of the greatest features of this institution has been the diversity of the backgrounds,  from an academic point of view,  as much as anything else,  of the faculty,  who have really contributed to the evolution of this institution.  We've had classicists,  we've had historians.

I myself started in the marketing department 1977,  on the same day that another professor,  Richard Tedlow,  who,  of course,  is a business historian from Yale started here with me,  but teaching marketing.  Even though he was a business historian by training.  And that's,  of course,  where he spent his career.  Nevertheless,  it was felt very important that he develop an understanding of the first year,  understand a particular subject matter within the first year.  And the benefit of that was enormous,  both for him,  but also for those of us who came from a more clear-cut marketing disciplinary background.  He was able to raise questions,  and bring insights to our discussions and our teaching groups that really opened — opened the eyes of many of us to issues that we wouldn't normally have been thinking about.  So from that point of view,  this diversity of academic background was very important.

I think it's very critical that we don't lose that.  You know,  in the last thirty years since I joined the faculty,  of course,  the disciplines of management have become much more established.  There's a much greater literature in each those disciplines that any specialist needs to have command of.   And so it's,  in a sense,  slightly more difficult for an eclectic outsider to parachute in,  and contribute,  and be accepted,  and become a well-published scholar in a field that they may not have had any previous acquaintance with.  We've got to fight any trend towards silos,  and towards disciplinary walls being built that prevent interaction, integration, and cross-fertilization.

And I know that that's one of our main efforts at the moment,  to develop integrated research,  and integrated teaching,  activity that involves not only folks on our faculty,  but also people in other departments in the university who are going to come at many of the same problems that we're looking at,  but from a very different point of view.