The Knowledge@Wharton blog (one of my favorites) has a fascinating interview with Dana Gioia about the connection between business and poetry. Who better to ponder that connection than someone who graduated from Stanford business school, served as vice president of General Foods, became a published poet, and was named chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts? A few excerpts from the interview:

Well, first of all let me make something clear, because people often get my career a little bit confused. I'm the only person, in history, who went to business school to be a poet. This is because I wanted to be a poet and I wanted to have a job, a career and I didn't want to be in academia. I found business interesting and I found the problems and opportunities that you work with in business very interesting.

So, I went to Stanford Business School and then spent fifteen years in corporate life. I sort of came into business as a poet. And I have to say that having attended Stanford and Harvard, that I got my education in business. It has taught me a lot of things that have helped me as a poet.

I think the most fundamental thing is that in business, I was working with very smart people who were more average [I think] in terms of their interests. They had a rather high work ethic and they were very intelligent people. And, I was able, for fifteen years to live and work with people - who were not literary people. It gave me a better sense of the language and of the kinds of issues/ideas and subjects that the average person is more interested in. And, it took me out of the "hot house" of the English Department. . . .

I think that if you come into the business, with an arts background, you have a tremendously difficult time initially. This is because it's a very different world, it looks at problems differently and by and large, they don't necessarily respect your background.

For that reason, I did not let anyone I worked with know that I was a poet. This is because, let me ask you a question, if you had a poet working for you, wouldn't you check his or her addition? So privately I went through a very difficult time. That being said, as you rise in business, as you get out of the lower level staff jobs and the quantitative analysis, and you get into the higher level of problems, I felt that I had an enormous advantage over my colleagues because I had a background in the imagination, in language and in literature.

This is because once you get into middle and upper management, the decisions that you make are largely qualitative and creative. And, most people who do really well in the early quantitative stages are grossly unprepared for the real challenges of upper management, at least in marketing which was the industry that I was working in, marketing and product management. . . .

Well, if you take the word poet in the old Greek sense of "a maker", what entrepreneurs and artists have in common is that they imagine something that they then bring into reality. And, as any poet or any composer or any entrepreneur knows, you imagine something, but to bring it to reality you revise and recalibrate it a million times to get it just right. So, I think the ability of envisioning something and then bringing it into being goes back to the ancient meaning of the word poetry -- Poesis which means the made thing.

There are lots of interesting nuggets in that interview, but I also encourage you to read it because I hear from so many college seniors that they're not sure what they want to do with themselves after graduation, but they are sure it can't be in business.

When I scratch that surface even a little bit, I soon discover that they know absolutely nothing about the business world. Add to that mix the indoctrination they receive from academics with their quaint, tenured, old-school Marxist contempt for the private sector and free enterprise, and it's no wonder people graduate from college thinking they are fit only for academia or non-profit work or -- dare I say it -- law school. (Which just goes to show you how little they know about what most lawyers do all day long.) They also have no idea that the skills they learned through their liberal arts training are useful in the corporate world.

So I'm going to be keeping an eye out for profiles and stories, like this one, about people who have done great and interesting things in the business world and connected their business lives with some other deeply held passion. I'll put them in a new category called "Business for Non-Corporate Types." Stay tuned!

What a weird story. The LA Times reports that an 18-year-old impostor named Azia Kim successfully passed as a student at Stanford for eight months:

The Stanford Daily, quoting one of Kim's former roommates, said the deception started in September, the day before Stanford's orientation for new students.

Two sophomores agreed to let Kim stay in their room after she told them she did not like the roommate she had been assigned.

When a gay, Canadian associate sued the venerable law firm Sullivan & Cromwell for anti-gay, anti-Canadian discrimination, he brought to light an uncomfortable truth: plenty of law firm partners treat everyone like crap, not just protected classes. It’s one of the paradoxes of our legal system that you’ll get into trouble if you treat certain subsets of humanity badly, but if you treat everyone badly, you’re generally in the clear, legally speaking.

I have been known to criticize law schools for being far less adaptable to changing markets and real world needs, and being generally less self-critical, than business schools are (see here, here, and here). Law school curricula have remained mostly static for a long, long time, and of course the law schools' cartel status* means they don't have to innovate as much as graduate programs that have to make the case for their value proposition year in and year out.

I'm excited to be quoted in an article on CNNMoney.com, also the internet home of Fortune magazine. The article is about mistakes that new college grads make in their job searches. They even mentioned the Ivey Files -- it's enough to make a blogger blush.

By the way, I'm a big fan of the Ask Annie column in Fortune. I've enjoyed reading it for years (including back when I read the paper version of Fortune).

The CIA, like the Las Vegas Police Department, has figured out that it needs to think more creatively to reach Gen Y. Its newly unveiled recruiting website features lots of snappy Flash animation spy quizzes and 24-style sound effects. Oddly, their press release says that they've posted a diversity recruiting video featuring Jennifer Garner of Alias fame, but after much clicking around I can't find it. Guess I flunked that test, huh? I did find this rather lame diversity video, though. Where's Jennifer?

Here's a fantastic example of a young professional getting himself into hot water by using bad judgment with firm-wide emails. I imagine there's more than just bad judgment at work here, but that's pure speculation.

Another example of bad email judgment here (although that email had the benefit of being pretty accurate in describing summer associate programs, which are just well-paying recruiting events).

Hat tip for both to Above the Law -- one of my favorites.

Learned about this cool new test prep service based in NYC -- it promises a "holistic" approach to test prep, so you're not just learning how to ace the test (SAT, GMAT, LSAT, etc.), but also learning how to tackle your test anxiety and stress using tools like hypnosis. I haven't ever tried a holistic approach to test prep, but given the number of applicants I hear from who feel absolutely crippled by their test anxiety, I thought I'd share it with you here. Apparently the founder (Bara Sapir) also has a 5-CD course coming out.

More info here.

In yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer:

After decades micromanaging virtually every aspect of their children's lives, baby boomers aren't backing off.

With their kids out of college, companies say, parents are now meddling in the workplace, trying to negotiate salaries or finagle second chances for rejected sons and daughters with bruised self-esteem.

"We were [planning] a phone screen with one candidate, and the parent came in to give us a picture of her child so we would know who we were talking to," said Karen Fox of the Vanguard Group in Malvern.

So many anxious mothers and fathers have called (and visited) that last fall the financial services company began sending letters to the parents of recruits, announcing that an offer had been made and touting the company's virtues as an employer.

The tactic - similar to Army TV ads designed to involve parents whose children want to enlist - has increased the percentage of college students who accept Vanguard offers, Fox said, and decreased annoying phone calls.

"You can't swat them down," Fox said of the hyperinvolved career advisers. "So you might as well embrace them."

Read more here.

I've written before about professional women off-ramping from the working world. Now comes this survey of Massachusetts lawyers that shows a significantly higher rate of attrition for female associates in private practice than their male counterparts:

Of the 1,000 Massachusetts lawyers who provided data for the report, 31 percent of female associates had left private practice entirely, compared with 18 percent of male associates.

The WSJ's Law Blog reports on the law firm that rescinded its offer to the co-founder of AutoAdmit:

The Law Blog has learned that law firm Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge rescinded its job offer to Anthony Ciolli, the 3L at Penn Law who resigned as “Chief Education Director” of AutoAdmit last month. He resigned in the wake of a WaPo exposé on how the site in part served as a platform for attacks and defamatory remarks about female law students, among others.

Employers weigh in at Inc.com -- great advice on what not to do during an interview.

See also here.

Ave Maria School of Law has been plagued by some interesting institutional challenges and weird publicity (most of it of its own making). First there was the plan to build Ave Maria Town in Florida and relocate the school from Michigan, a plan that generated lots of push-back from students and faculty. Now there's this news of misconduct by the dean of the law school. According to a statement by the law school faculty:

Until now, the majority of the faculty has not made public the outrageous behavior of the Law School's administration. We have remained silent in the hope of minimizing damage to our school, believing that responsible parties would set matters right, and out of fear of escalating acts of retaliation. At this point, however, we believe it is important to allow the larger legal community to know the reality of the way AMSL's administration has abused the power with which it has been entrusted.

Those who have not been closely following events at AMSL, nonetheless, may have heard of a number of events over the last year or so. To summarize: last spring, a substantial majority of the faculty issued a vote of "no confidence" in Dean Bernard Dobranski. The response from the AMSL Board of Governors, led by Board Chairman and AMSL's largest funder, Thomas Monaghan, was a terse restatement of its support for the Dean. This rejection of open discussions, combined with retaliatory actions by the Dean, exclusion of the faculty from governance of the school, and serious violations of academic freedom were subjects of an investigation by an ABAfact-finder earlier this year. In the midst of this ABAprocess, the AMSL Board voted in effect to close AMSL and transfer its assets to a new law school to be located on the campus of Ave Maria University, in southwest Florida.

Disagreement over this proposed move is thus only one aspect of the difficulties at AMSL. Problems at AMSL go much deeper, and are much more structural.  Since the vote of "no confidence" in Dean Dobranski in April 2006 over issues of faculty governance and academic freedom, he has used threats and retaliation to try to silence members of the faculty from voicing concerns about his leadership and that of Mr. Monaghan. A majority of the faculty whom the Dean believes to be disloyal to him have been punished financially and through manipulation of the promotion and tenure system. One tenured faculty member has been repeatedly threatened with termination based upon bizarre allegations. Junior faculty members have been threatened that their careers would be harmed if they associate with disfavored tenured faculty. We have also been informed that Dean Dobranski had instituted a system of monitoring our emails and computers, and student research assistants have been closely questioned about research projects of disfavored faculty members. All tenured faculty members have been removed from the Chairs of faculty committees, and such chairs are now in the control of the few faculty members whom the Dean believes to be loyal to him. Cumulatively, such intimidation and bullying has created an intolerable atmosphere of fear and contempt at our school....

Hat tip to Brian Leiter, who adds: "'Crisis' is probably an understatement for what seems to be going on there."

Documents revealed yesterday by The Daily Texan, the student newspaper of UT Austin, show just how little swag lenders have had to cough up to curry favor with financial aid officers. Preferred lender status in exchange for free Hula Hut Happy Hours? That's quite a return on investment.

As the Wall Street Journal reports:

The University of Texas at Austin's Office of Student Financial Services rated student-loan firms based on "treats" and other meals provided to university officials, school documents show.

In internal reviews of their lists of lenders recommended to students, financial-aid officials rated the loan companies based on loan volume, customer service and whether they offered students reduced fees. But "visibility" was another factor the office cited, which it defined as "based on the number of lunches, breakfasts and extracurricular functions for entire OSFS staff." Lenders on the list were graded on the quality of their culinary largesse by metrics ranging from "very good" to "poor."

Last month, the university put Lawrence Burt, associate vice president and director of student financial aid, on paid leave after it emerged he owned shares of a former parent of Student Loan Xpress Inc., now a unit of CIT Group Inc. Student Loan Xpress was rated "very good" in free meals and functions, according to a school analysis dated March 10, 2006. In an interview last month, Mr. Burt said that there was no connection to his stock ownership and that the company was one of 20 lenders picked for service and benefits. "I did not do anything wrong," he said.

One document titled "Lender Treats," also dated March 10, 2006, listed a "Hula Hut Happy Hour" courtesy of one lender; and a lasagna lunch from another.

Duke's Fuqua School of Business has disciplined 34 first-year MBA students (including expulsion for nine) who were caught when a professor spotted similarities in their answers on a take-home test. That's almost 10% of the class of 2008.

This story comes on the heels of the scandals in 2005 when Harvard Business School and MIT's Sloan School rejected 150 applicants who had hacked their way into admissions office databases to find out whether they had been accepted.

Can ethics be taught in the classroom? Business schools seem to think so -- they all trumpet the ethics components of their curricula. I tend to think ethics is one of those things you have to learn at home long before you get to grad school.

It's also an interesting time for higher ed to be wagging its finger at applicants and students, given recent revelations about graft among financial aid officers and con artist Marilee Jones, former dean of admissions at MIT.

See more Ivey Files postings on cheating here and here.

Kristina Cowan has interviewed me for a number of articles (see here and here and here), and she wrote me recently to say that she now has her own blog ("The Salary Reporter: All the job-and-salary news fit to blog"). I checked it out, and I highly recommend it. We write about a lot of the same topics, so keep your eye out for her postings.

Here's a great article in BusinessWeek about women bailing from the corporate world to start their own ventures.

MIT Dean of Admissions Marilee Jones has just resigned: "I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to MIT 28 years ago and did not have the courage to correct my resume when I applied for my current job or at any time since."

MIT demanded her resignation after her credentials were challenged ten days ago and subsequently investigated.

What an interesting development on the heels of this article about admissions officers hiring investigators ("admissions police") to verify applicants' credentials and crack down on applicant plagiarism and fraud.

I had been one of Jones's admirers for her efforts to reduce the anxiety and insanity inherent in today's college admissions process. This is a sad development.