Unconventional business course rotates professors

An unconventional master’s in business administration course is offering students the opportunity to learn from experts in different public policy fields in just two weeks.

Last week, “The Government and Legal Environment of Business” — a mandatory course for all first-year Wharton MBA students — began with its first pair of lectures.

The course offers a total of 11 lecture topics. The kicker, though, is that each individual lecture is given by a different Wharton professor who is an expert in that particular subject.

Lecture topics vary widely, with titles ranging from “Unwinding from the Great Housing Boom” to “The Arab Spring: An Economist’s Perspective.”

Of the 11 topics available, students select three lecture subjects and write a policy position memo per session.

With the 2012 presidential election season underway, Wharton professor Robert Inman noted the timeliness of this course.

“We’re offering first-year MBA students exposure to what we feel are going to be major issues in the upcoming presidential campaign, issues likely to affect the business community.” Inman is teaching one of the lecture topics in this course called “States or the Feds: Who Does What Best?”

Inman added that the variety of professors participating in this course is a significant advantage to students.

“The big advantage of the offering is the fact that we have 11 major contributors to each of the policy debates and that students will think systematically and hopefully carefully about these issues,” he said.

Weighing 0.5 course credits, “The Government and Legal Environment of Business” consists of two halves.

In the first half of the course, students study the legal environment of business. In the second half, students focus more on public policy.

According to Inman, both halves enable students to experience a wide breadth of topics that examine the relationship between policy and business.

He added that the course “showcases the significant capacity of the school to expose students to the frontier of policy research” and provides insight into healthcare, tax and labor policy, among other issues.

First-year MBA student Christine Fok said she had a positive impression of the course after attending her first lecture last week.

“The professor gave a good introduction of the European Union and the Eurozone,” she said of her lecture, which was entitled “How the Greeks Undermined the European Union.”

“When I came into the class I was only expecting to learn about the historical aspect of it,” she added.

However, some students felt that the current version of the course is too short.

“I wish it were longer, because the course is very applicable to business going forward,” first-year Wharton MBA student Tambandini Munhutu said. Munhutu also selected “How the Greeks Undermined the European Union” as one of her three lecture topics.

“The professor is really distilling it into two sessions,” she added. “There’s a lot more nuances that would be interesting to learn more about if the sessions were longer.”

For Wharton professor Mark Pauly, the structure of this course allows more students to learn and benefit from their experiences in an efficient way.

“I get into discussions about policy and politics with students outside the classroom, but this is an attempt to do it in a more organized way,” he said. “It’s mainly a chance to do something that you like to do in a setting where more people can benefit from it.”

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