[photopress:MIT.jpg,full,alignright]A recent study published in the New York Times said that MIT (that is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which you should avoid saying or spelling for both are difficult and, indeed, I got the spelling wrong first time) has more Internet addresses than China.
This seems a most unlikely story. Indeed, an urban myth in the making. It is claiming numbers for one institution are being larger than those of the second largest country in the world. Seems extremely unlikely. Perhaps we should restate it has say that MIT has a lot of web sites. Before the end of the coming year it is very likely that more than 50 percent of Web users will be Chinese. It is unlikely they will spend their time perusing the web sites of MIT, attractive though they may be.
Since 1996, MIT Sloan has been working on MBAs which are relevant to China, especially since China’s admission into the World Trade Organization in 2001. MIT Sloan works with graduate students in three Chinese IMBA programs through collaboration between MIT Sloan and Chinese universities.
MIT Sloan established the MIT-China Management Education Project in 1996 with Tsinghua University in Beijing and Fudan University in Shanghai. Lingnan College at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou joined the project in 1999. MIT Sloan also provides support for the MBA Program at Yunnan University in Kunming through training of its MBA faculty. In China, the MIT-China Management Education Project has been endorsed at the highest levels.
One of the highest priorities of the MIT-China Management Education Project is faculty development. The project brings Chinese faculty to MIT Sloan to work with MIT Sloan faculty and take classes with MIT Sloan MBA students. The visiting professors then incorporate this new knowledge into the curriculum and teaching formats at their own universities. To date, virtually all the IMBA faculty at Tsinghua, Fudan, and Lingnan have made at least one visit to MIT Sloan.
Speaking during a video conference to an audience of MIT Sloan and Tsinghua IMBA faculty and students, Donald Lessard, Epoch Foundation Professor of International Management, congratulated the Chinese faculty on its success in integrating the new knowledge into the curriculum.
All of this came from a press release issued by MIT which was quite woeful. As overblown a piece of PR puffery as you would expect from a computer company. Flackery run riot. Plainly MIT can teach management. It has very little idea how to present ideas. Perhaps it has a lot it can learn from China.
Source: MIT Sloan
