Global Headlines Express | The Two Koreas Sign the Panmunjom Declaration, Pledging to End the War Within the Year; The Guardian Says Business Schools Need a Radical Overhaul
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in trial run. As ever, it is here to help you know more.
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in trial run. As ever, it is here to help you know more.
What the agenda-setters are talking about
The Guardian: Why We Should Bulldoze the Business School
The author is Martin Parker, who has taught in business schools for 20 years.
Business schools keep multiplying, and keep getting more expensive. They are widely seen as places that teach fraud, and as petri dishes for a culture of short-termism and greed. The MBA — Master of Business Administration — is often said to stand for "Mediocre But Arrogant," "More Bad Advice," or "Master Bullshit Artist."
What stands out is that over the past decade much of the criticism has come from inside the schools. It is business school professors who have been doing the exposing: their institutions have gone badly off the rails and turned corrupt. Deans chase money, lecturers teach whatever they like, researchers publish journal articles nobody reads, and students only want to swap their parents' money for a degree. Few of the graduates reach senior management; most become interchangeable robots in office cubicles.
That these loud complaints from insiders are ignored is the more worrying part, because it means nobody really cares about the problems, and the teaching goes on as before.
Which fits the content of the teaching itself: look at the world only through capitalism, and chase the largest possible profit.
Most of the fixes scholars have proposed so far dodge any drastic reform. They cluster around "a return to more traditional business teaching," or a few extra courses on "responsibility" and "ethics." None of them reaches the root of it. Business schools currently teach one form of organization only — the management of capital markets — as though "capitalism" were the sole way to understand the world and arrange a life. For most business schools, which sit inside universities, it did not have to be that way, and it is precisely this single lens that has produced all these problems.
The author argues that people should perhaps think about management, business and markets in a new way. If you want the powerful people of the future to be "responsible," do not tell students that transformational leadership solves everything, that the point of marketing is to manufacture new desires, or that the point of studying tax law is to avoid tax. If you water students with capitalism, do not be surprised when the people who end up drawing huge salaries are gambling with other people's money. If you teach them to have no limits, do not be surprised when words like "diversity," "sustainability" and "responsibility" turn into ornaments, a fig leaf for the deans' "consciences."
In short, the modern business school teaches people how to take money out of ordinary people's pockets and keep it, that "greed is good," and that one should "not think too hard about the moral consequences." Students like this practical style of education, and in survey after survey they turn out to be readier to cheat, readier to commit financial crimes, and readier to put shareholder interests above employees' interests and customer satisfaction.
Marketing business schools while ignoring all this will not do. We need to study and teach more forms of organization than capitalism alone, to meet the more complicated, many-sided problems society throws at us. Chanting the phrase "corporate social responsibility" achieves nothing. What business schools need is to be broken apart and put back together.
24-hour news makers
On April 27, Korea time, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean leader Moon Jae-in held talks on the South Korean side of Panmunjom. Afterwards the two signed the Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and Unification of the Korean Peninsula, saying they would work to declare an end to the state of war within the year, turn the armistice agreement into a peace treaty, and press for multilateral talks including China and the United States.
Both sides pledged to halt all hostile acts, to disarm in stages, and to stop loudspeaker broadcasts across the border from May 1, with complete denuclearization of the peninsula as their shared goal.
They agreed to hold summits regularly, to exchange views on major events in depth over a hotline, to build mutual trust across the board, to set up a North-South joint liaison office, and to hold reunions for families separated by the war. Moon Jae-in will visit Pyongyang this autumn.
This was the third summit between the two Koreas, and the first time Kim Jong Un had set foot on South Korean soil — the first North Korean leader to enter South Korean territory since the Korean War armistice.
Earlier that day the two men each stepped across the 38th parallel to shake the other's hand, reviewed an honor guard together and talked for 100 minutes. Kim Jong Un told Moon Jae-in, "I hear you always sleep badly, because you get woken up for national security meetings... because of us. I will make sure you sleep well from now on."
Trump made his first comment after the declaration was signed: "Good things are happening, but only time will tell." He added later, "KOREAN WAR TO END! The United States, and all of its GREAT people, should be very proud of what is now taking place in Korea!" At the White House he said the United States would not be played by North Korea, and that he had nearly settled on a location for the two of them to meet.
What else happened in the world
Shaanxi's Mizhi county reports on the April 27 stabbing; the student death toll rises to nine. At about 6:10pm on April 27, a stabbing took place outside the gate of Mizhi County No. 3 Middle School, where a man with a dagger wounded 19 students. This morning's report said that as of 11pm on April 27 the number of students killed had risen to nine (seven girls, two boys), and the other 10 wounded were receiving emergency treatment. The suspect was taken into police custody after the attack.
Kensington Palace issued a statement announcing that the newborn son of Prince William and Kate Middleton has been named Louis Arthur Charles. He is the third child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and fifth in line to the British throne.
Norway's sovereign wealth fund, the world's largest, takes its heaviest loss in years. Norway's central bank said that, hit by turbulence in global stock markets, the fund lost 171 billion Norwegian kroner (21 billion US dollars) in the first quarter, breaking a run of seven straight quarters of positive returns. Its equity portfolio did especially badly, with the rate of return down 2.2%.
The EU bans bee-harming pesticides outright. Neonicotinoids, the most widely used pesticides in the world, will be banned entirely by the EU within six months because of the serious threat they pose to bee populations — they are one trigger of colony collapse disorder. Bees pollinate three-quarters of food crops, which makes them critical to the world's food supply, and heavy pesticide use has sent pollinator numbers plunging. The EU banned neonicotinoids on bee-attracting crops back in 2013, but has since found that the pesticides have contaminated water and soil and are reaching many more plants.
Russian lawyer Natalya Veselnitskaya confirmed as a Russian informant. She met senior figures from the Trump campaign at Trump Tower in 2016, and has now admitted she was an informant for Yuri Y. Chaika, Russia's prosecutor general.
India moves to make the rape of boys under 12 punishable by death. A week ago India enacted the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2018, which set the death penalty for raping girls under 12. The Ministry of Women and Child Development (WCD) is now petitioning the cabinet to apply the same penalty to those who rape boys.
Someone said
So wrote Rwanda's The New Times in a column this week.
On the 24th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, another mass grave has been found near a residential district in the capital, Kigali.
Authorities have torn down the houses and toilets built over the grave to search further. During the genocide, Hutu soldiers had set up a roadblock on the spot. Judging by the number of residents reported missing from the district at the time, the grave is thought to hold about 2,000 to 3,000 people; the remains found so far include infants.
The killing of Tutsis and moderate Hutus by Hutus between April and July 1994 left 800,000 to a million people dead. A decade of United Nations trials led to some of the killers being caught, but many are still free. "The killers who took part in murdering our relatives will not tell us where they buried them," said France Mukanagazwa, who lost her father and other relatives in the genocide. "How can you reconcile with people like that?"
"He doesn't have a plane, you asshole! He — you — make me sick!"
So shouted Bill Cosby, the first celebrity convicted of sexual assault in the #MeToo era, at the district attorney in court. The verdict had just been read out, and Cosby had stared straight ahead throughout, composed. The prosecutor then asked that Cosby be jailed at once, and the district attorney told the judge that Cosby owned a plane and might well flee — which is what set off the outburst.
Cosby, now 80, is a well-known comedian of his generation, a household name and widely respected for his "America's Dad" image. But more than 50 women have come forward over time to accuse him of sexual assault or harassment. On Thursday a Montgomery County court found him guilty on three felony counts in a sexual assault case that fell within the statute of limitations. No sentencing date has been set, but he will most likely spend the rest of his life in prison.
After the verdict many of the victims wept and embraced the prosecutors and lawyers. "Justice has been served," said the celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred. "We are delighted, because now we can finally say it — women have been believed."
Things you might also be curious about
Horses can remember your expression.
Research at the University of Sussex in Britain shows that horses can read and remember human emotions. "We know horses can read facial expressions, so we wanted to find out whether they can also remember them, and then use that memory to guide their future dealings with particular people."
The researchers showed 10 horses two photographs each, one of an angry face and one of a smiling face. Three to six hours later they brought the person from the photograph in front of the horse — the person did not know which of their faces the horse had examined. The horses spent a long time studying the "angry face" person with the left eye; information taken in by the left eye goes to the right hemisphere, which horses use to size up danger and threat. The "smiling face" person got longer looks from the right eye instead (the left hemisphere handles positive, sociable emotions). When they met the "angry face" again, the horses also showed various behaviors typical of stress: chewing, scratching, sniffing at the ground.
Perhaps we should smile at horses more often. Like dogs, they remember who was good to them.
ABBA release new songs after 35 years
The Swedish pop group ABBA, made up of two married couples, topped the British and American singles and album charts repeatedly between 1974 and 1980, and are the most famous husband-and-wife act in the history of pop music (and the most famous divorced one). The band split up in 1982, but today, 35 years on, announced that they had recorded two new songs together. "It was fun to get back into the studio together after 35 years, so we just did it," the band said in a statement. "It felt as if time had stood still and we had only been away on a short holiday... We may be older, but the songs are new, and it feels good."
The average American spends more on having a baby than William and Kate did.
Kate Middleton's delivery and postnatal care cost roughly 8,900 US dollars, which was already enough to prompt many Britons to question the royal family's "extravagant" childbirth spending. Set against what ordinary Americans pay to have a baby, though, the figure is not high at all.
Figures from 2015 show the United States is the most expensive country in the world to give birth in, at an average of 10,800 US dollars — and that excludes prenatal and postnatal care. With everything included, American hospitals charge 32,093 US dollars for a normal vaginal delivery plus newborn care, and 51,125 US dollars for a standard cesarean section.
On this day in history
April 28, 1908: Oskar Schindler, who saved more than a thousand Jews during the Second World War, was born.
April 28, 1945: Mussolini was executed.
April 28, 1956: The policy of "letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend" was put forward.
April 28, 2003: Apple's iTunes Music Store went live.
Tomorrow and the day after, in history
April 29, 1902: The U.S. Senate passed the Chinese Exclusion Act.
April 29, 1951: The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein died.
April 29, 1997: The Chemical Weapons Convention came into force.
April 29, 2016: Chen Zhongshi, winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize and author of White Deer Plain, died.
April 30, 1777: The German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss was born.
April 30, 1789: George Washington was sworn in as the first President of the United States.
April 30, 1945: Soviet forces took Berlin and Hitler killed himself.
Cover image from CBC News
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.