Management of the world, unite!
Perhaps that should be the new motto of Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR), after four seniors in the school penned a letter to the editor in today’s Cornell Sun complaining of the ILR school’s exclusion from the future Cornell College of Business.
The four authors—Juliana Batista ’16, Zachary Benfanti ’16, Kendall Grant ’16, Catherine McAnney ’16—believe ILR’s exclusion from the College of Business is an affront to the school’s status as a business school and will dissuade high school students from applying to the school and corporate employers from recruiting ILR students.
An excerpt:
As ILR students, we are taught that our curriculum is based on the idea of “advancing the world of work” by addressing various perspectives such as human resources, organizational behavior, and labor economics. We are taught that we can have a profound impact in fields such as law, finance, and consulting. We are taught that we are an integral part of business education at Cornell.
As students ponder the decision to matriculate to the ILR Class of 2020, developing the narrative for future applicants to attend ILR will become increasingly difficult. A multitude of students are originally attracted to the ILR undergraduate curriculum because of the flexibility and opportunities provided in a vast array of fields. With a designated College of Business, we expect many potential students will be redirected to the programs in the Dyson School and the School of Hotel Administration. Will the ILR program simply devolve into a social sciences school funneling students into human resources and law school therefore losing the essence of “one major, endless possibilities”?
This is not the first round of complaints to focus on the College of Business, which was approved by the Board of Trustees earlier this month. The School of Hotel Administration, Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, and the Johnson School will be part of the new business school.
Though the ILR School is neither an accredited business school as the Hotel School is nor does it offer finance or accounting concentrations as the Dyson School does, the letter claims 30% of ILR students desire a career in the finance or consulting industries. ILR students can take some economics courses and with their electives take more hard finance and accounting courses outside of their curriculum, but as the letter notes the ILR’s school main focus, it’s signature focus, is employee/employer relations. This, the authors write, gives ILR students an advantage when it comes to recruiting because they have a “fresh perspective” as opposed to more general business curriculum students.
But, if the ILR school does give students this advantage not shared among the other business-oriented schools at Cornell, why does it want to become a part of the College of Business? If it’s for the name recognition and associated recruiting advantages, then this is an endorsement of the College of Business—coming from the president of the Student Assembly (SA), Juliana Batista, despite the SA having passed a resolution disavowing the business college two weeks ago.
The four authors of the letter, at the end, list their future job titles, among them investment banker and equity analyst. This, it seems, is some sort of endorsement of the ILR School’s ability to place students in the world of finance.
One can only wonder how this letter’s perspective on the ILR School and its author’s touting their high-fiance job positions meld with the ILR School’s (ostensible) focus on labor. Since it seems the most vocal student leaders in the ILR School are very excited about the corporate world, want to push their school further in that direction, and are distraught over their exclusion from the College of Business, perhaps the ILR School should now pass itself as a grooming center of future managers, rather than advocates of workers.
