The Bubble is Bigger than I Thought

I currently attend a top ranked business school. Our accounting program is ranked #2 nationally and our MBA program was just ranked #1 for Regional Schools and #2 for Emphasis on Ethics by the Wall Street Journal. We've received plenty of praise and recognition over the years and continue to expand our school both in class sizes and physical size. Sounds like we've got everything figured out, right? Ummm...if you consider blatant racial slams as good things, then yes...we're firing on all cylinders.

I'm referring to two comments made in a Project Management class I have. Let me give you the two incidents and then I'll tell why they're so disturbing to me.

Incident #1

The first one was made while talking about our professor's experience when he studied accounting in Mexico. Our professor said, "Upon returning to the States, I found that Mexican accounting differed greatly from US accounting." A student in the front row blurted out, "Yeah. No more five finger discounts."

Incident #2

We were discussing task duration estimates when creating a project schedule. A student (from Mexico) asked the question, "What happens when people lie about the time it will take them." To which a different student in the front row responded, "Juan, we're not in Mexico."


What? Where did those comments come from? Now I'd like to tell you a bit about the two students who made those comments. Both are white males in their mid to late 20's. Both likely served "missions" for our Church, probably to a foreign country. And last of all, both are MBA students at our school which is, again, ranked #2 for "Emphasis on Ethics."

So, it's not so much the content of the comments that has me flabbergasted, it's the setting in which they were made that astounds me. Here we are, a school that teaches tolerance, a school where students speak over 40 different languages, and our students are making ignorant racial comments like this in class?! How can they get away with it?

Simple. We live in a bubble. This school is predominantly one religion and one race. All those "different languages" are spoken by American students who served religious missions abroad. If you look at the dominant race, we're almost all white. Our culture here is non-confrontational, so even if people were extremely pissed about what they said, they'd never do anything about it. Take those two students and put them in a class at UCLA. They would have been torn to shreds! Man, these two guys are in for a rude awakening when they get out of the bubble here.

If you look beyond the campus, you won't find much hope. Recently one of our state senators made a stupid remark that was perceived as racist. While debating an education bill, Senator Chris Buttars commented, "This baby is black, I'll tell you. This is a dark, ugly thing." .... ..... To make things worse, he agreed to meet with the NAACP to smooth things over, but when they called the press to be at the meeting, Buttars stood them up. Oh that's real smart. Slam a person's racial background, and then skip out on their organizational leaders. Why don't you call up one of your old girlfriends, ask her out on a makeup date, and then have one of your buddies show up in your place and throw a pie in her face.

For an example of how to do this, see the following clip from Never Been Kissed. Start the clip at 2:45.



Sidenote: The guy from the NAACP said something ludicrous as well. (Luda!) Someone made a remark about "lynchings." The guy said, "He doesn't know anything about lynchings. We know about real lynchings." Ummmm....every black person I've ever met (and I lived in Africa for two years) knows just as much about lynching as I do...that it's wrong and is something we read about in history books.

Back from the sidenote, it sucks that we demand a high standard from our aspiring students and yet they have idiotic examples running the government. Chris Buttars is running for reelection, by the way. I've heard this isn't his first time embarrassing his state.

I sincerely hope that the other MBA students at our school have more class than these three. If not, then our program is in for some real problems.