This year’s Sumantra Ghoshal Conference, held at London Business School, debated whether strategy research has become irrelevant to the practice of management. The late Mr Ghoshal published a paper in 2005 scolding business schools for pouring "bad theory" on their students. That same year Warren Bennis and James O’Toole, both at the University of Southern California, published an article in the Harvard Business Review criticising MBA programmes for paying too much attention to "scientific" research and not enough to what current and future managers actually needed. Business schools, they argued, would be better off acting more like their professional counterparts, such as medical or law schools, nurturing skilled practitioners as well as frequent publishers.
However, business school professors have a tendency not to change. Since universities take journal rankings into account when awarding tenure, academics are rewarded more when they publish in research journals. (Popular media rankings of MBA programmes, although not The Economist’s, also take research output into account.)
In 2008 the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) took up the debate, publishing a report on making business research more useful. It suggested that tenure committees become more flexible. A scholar dedicated to popularising management ideas, for example, should be evaluated on book sales and attention from the news media, not on articles in research journals. This would allow faculty to reach out to wider audiences, rather than be, as Messrs Bennis and O’Toole put it, "damned as popularisers".
But that might also risk granting tenure on the basis of trendy but ultimately unhelpful ideas. In any case, some argue that the relevance of business research is understated. Jan Williams, vice chair of AACSB, argues that doing research allows faculty members to stay at the forefront of their subject, and that in turn improves their teaching. "We can’t teach students outdated material," he says.
What is more, a paper in Academy of Management Learning & Education suggests that faculty members’ research productivity and their students’ earnings after graduation may be positively linked. Certainly, the best known schools often have p research reputations to match their recognition in the wider world. So, should a student worry about a faculty’s research ability when applying to a school If business schools with better researchers produce better-paid graduates, then perhaps they should. But only up to a point: what MBA students most need is skillful teaching and help in developing their critical thinking skills first; access to frontier research comes afterwards. As Messrs Bennis and O’Toole put it: "Business professors too often forget that executive decision-makers are not fact-collectors; they are fact users and integrators.
AACSB suggested that（）
A. professors should not pay heed to scientific research
B. a more reasonable evaluating system be established to judge professors
C. scholars should entertain a large audience if they want to be successful
D. a flexible evaluating way be created to put scientific research into application
参考答案：B
解析：
[试题类型] 具体信息题。
[解题思路] 根据题干关键词AACSB定位至第三段。该段指出，管理商学院联合会发表了一份报告，探讨了如何使商业研究更加实用，并认为授予教授终身职位的评价标准应该更加灵活(It suggested that tenure committees become more flexible)，接着对此举例说明。由此可见，该组织赞成建立一个更加合理的教授评价体系，故选项[B]最符合文意。
[干扰排除] AACSB认为，不该以发表学术文章的数量作为授予教授终身职位的标准(...not on articles in research journals)，但这并不是说该组织认为教授不应该注重科研活动，故排除选项[A]。文中提到对于教授的评价标准可以参考其著作的销售量及其受媒体的关注度(A scholar...should be evaluated on book sales and attention from the news media)，这样教授会有更多的读者，也不会被人指责为一群只会写论文的糟糕作家。但拥有大批观众只是对教授学术成绩的评价标准之一，选项[C]将其引申为“评判教授成功与否的标准”，太过绝对，故排除。文中只提到，AACSB认为授予教授终身职位的评价标准应该更加灵活，而没有提到一种将科研成果应用于实践的灵活方式，故排除选项[D]。