Today, the Dean of the MBA programme held a forum of discussion with the participants on the Asia campus to find out whether there were any problem this term. It turns out that there was a problem with one of the classes: one of the professor had language and communication difficulties. It is a strategy class, a new professor and he cannot tell the difference (apparently - I am not taking this class so this is second hand material) between quality and quantity.

Some students vehemently voiced the problem. Their tone was accusative and the poor Dean must have felt on the front line of a First World War charge, outside of the trenches. Some students kept repeating themselves, proposing solutions but then moving onto questioning the long established hiring policy. We spent over 40 minutes on the subject, out of a one hour meeting - and half the people in the room were not taking this class. I learned that another meeting was scheduled to discuss the issue in the afternoon.

I can understand that everyone felt very emotional about the problem and needed to vent some of these feelings. MBA participants are paying a lot of money to come to INSEAD - more or less depending on their opportunity cost of course. Their expectations are high - and they should be high when they go to a top tiers institutions on the promise that they will access top tiers education. As someone pointed out during the discussion, it is better to have someone who knows only 50 about a subject but who can transfer 80% of this knowledge onto students, than someone who knows 100 about a subject but who cannot transfer more than 0.5%. The professor is a brilliant researcher but a poor teacher. Ok.
Being aggressive in their address to the Dean - who is not even accountable for faculty issues since this responsibility falls onto the Dean of the Faculty -, probably does not solve the problem. Listing the problems, proposing various solutions and then move on would probably be ok. The Dean came as a messenger and got shot.

Most people dropped the class and are taking other strategy electives.

The other classes are top notch and everyone admitted it. In fact, professors spend a great deal of time besides classes to make the experience quite unforgettable. In our Negotiation Class for instance, we have negoGym to do extra practice. The professor coaches us. He gives workshops for salary negotiations; he watches video tapes with hours worth of crappy deals and give feedback to individual participants. He develops a personal Goal List for each participant and reviews this list with everyone in the class. In our entrepreneurship class, the professor goes out of his way to help out with contacts, information and tips and hints. In our Finance class, the professor is going to read and grade 10 cases throughout the course. Imagine: 25 people in the class, organized in groups of 3 and 5 ages per case each time, excluding appendix. This is a lot of work.