How True Is This!

Joseph Jaffe is in the process of writing his second book titled "Join The Conversation". It should be out sometime in September. Jaffe decided to have a cover design contest for his book. You can also join the conversation and pick your favorite cover. This is the cover I voted for. Right now I'm the only one who's voted for it. You can see the results here. But I voted for this cover because it has significance in the place I'm currently at. How true is this! Being in the business school, and the marketing program more specifically, it used to amuse me but now I'm getting nothing short of pissed off at how disconnected some teachers are with reality. Lets be honest, some of these teachers  in the business school have never had real jobs and it reflects in their curriculum. Why are they still talking at us with their theories, models and principles; or trying to shove everything into a metric or something linear. Is this education? No, it's definetly not. True education just like new marketing is conversation. Some teachers try to create conversation but they fail misserably and it's cause they are asking the wrong questions about the wrong content. Every quarter I keep think it will get better but there always seems to be a few classes that are just a joke. For example, no one cares about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the ABC Model of Attributes, 5 Factor Theory of Personality or the infamous 4 P's of marketing. We all know there is no application to any of this. What if my employer asked me to develop a marketing strategy or campaign? What am I going to do, busted out my college text books and apply some of the stuff in there? I'd get laughed at and probably fired for incompetence. Teachers need to speak from real world experience and talk about current issues. I didn't decide to major in business or more specifically marketing because I wanted to learn about history. Last time I checked that's why colleges have history departments. Institutions need to be forward thinking and if teachers can't incorporate this philosophy into their classes and/or can't speak from true business experience because they've had very little or none at all, then they shouldn't be teaching. A PhD means nothing and it's one fucking shame that WWU's business school, to make itself look more "qualified" from an evaluation stand point, laid off almost all of its professors who only had MBA's and not PhD's. In addition, weren't most of these professors teaching here in the first place not because they had the most advanced degreee but because they had a lot of real world experience? Education within the institution as we know it needs to change. I've learned more about marketing from the free resources in reading blogs and listening to podcasts then from the "education" my parents have thus far been paying thousands of dollars to WWU for. Final thought: with the internet as developed as it is and our ability to connect with others who have very narrow and focused interests, from a learning standpoint, do we really need the institution anymore? It used to make total sense in bringing the human and informational resources together from geographically dispersed area's; but the college in its present state, if it hasn't already outlived its usefulness, in time, it surely will.