Many of our readers have seen the article about Wharton in this month’s Philadelphia Magazine: Is Wharton Ruining American Business?

For those of you who haven’t read the piece, the premise is that the author, Maureen Tkacik, somehow infiltrated the Wharton campus and spent a year attending classes and social events. Over the course of some 3,500 words, Tkacik makes a series of bold claims about Wharton and the value of the MBA degree in general. The author also concludes that MBAs are ammoral, lazy and largely responsible for all that is wrong in the business world.

Although the conclusions drawn in the article are varied – some may have merit and some are debatable [see the Economist's take on this subject from their February 17th, 2005 issue] – we’d like to call your attention to an interesting side-plot that seems to be developing here. The side-plot surrounds the motives of the article’s author and the methods she has employed to hype her story. Here are a few items of note:

1) On May 31st, at the time of article’s release, Tkacik used her newly created Business Week Discussion Forums account to create a new thread entitled “A story about the Wharton School” and post a link to the article. Her brief posting said the following: “From the learning team retreat to the Pub Controversy, it’s all here.” She did not sign her name or clearly indicate that she was the author of the article she was hyping. Needless to say, this effort quickly sent eyeballs to her article online and generated a lot of discussion (more on that later).

2) Tkacik continued her efforts to generate a buzz about her article, by emailing it to David Farber, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and gatekeeper of the popular Interesting People mailing list. Her email to Farber read as follows:

From: Maureen Tkacik
Date: May 31, 2005 2:28:54 PM EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Reply-To: mo@phillymag.com

The headline is a bit much — I didn’t write it — but I thought you might enjoy a bit of an anti-MBA rant: http://www.phillymag.com/ArticleDisplay.php?id=569

Farber promptly posted the article to his discussion group. Of course, what’s most interesting here is that Tkacik herself characterizes the piece as an “anti-MBA rant”.

3) In the meantime, the article was generating quite a bit of discussion in the BW discussion forums – with Tkacik herself responding to critics and fans alike (not to mention the Wharton students she had befriended who now feel betrayed). While the debate was to be expected, it’s revealing in terms of what it tells us about Tkacik’s views. Here are a few comments she makes in her postings on the board:

-in defending her decision to leave the Wall Street Journal and write for Philadelphia Magazine, Tkacik says the following: “There are things you can’t do at the Journal, and writing ‘reported essays’ about jargon crazed ROI slaves is one of them.” Describing MBA students as jargon-crazed ROI slaves would seem to be a bit harsh – especially for an unbiased reporter.

-in responding to a posting that compliments the article, Tkacik offered: “I met a lot of great people at Wharton. In general I just think the MBA is kind of a scam. When Milken and Huntsman and John Olson (the Merrill analyst who got fired for refusing to put a buy on Enron) were going, only a few thousand got MBAs every year. I think, now, that the value of the degree has been diluted but it’s too big a revenue center for universities to break the cycle.”

-when a reader wondered how Tkacik managed to spend a year on campus (since she also authored other articles during this time), she responds: “That was sort of packaging. Obviously I could not actually spend a year at Wharton. This article would not really make for a sufficient ROI. I did spend a few days every month attending MBA classes and functions.”

-if the comment above strikes you as odd, what’s even stranger is that it has actually been changed by Tkacik since it first appeared. Although we do not have the full text of the original posting, the Business Week forum shows snippets of original postings (pre-edited) when one searches the database (likely due to a bit of a glitch in their search engine). Here’s the original piece associated with this posting: “That was packaging. Initially they wanted to put “spent six …- from TKACIK1, 5/31/2005″. We’re not sure how this sentence originally ended, but it seems odd that it was deleted. Does this mean that the author only spent 6 months on campus? 6 weeks? It would seem unethical to put one’s name on an article that claims 1-year if that isn’t the truth…

One can’t help but wonder if the article’s author hasn’t fallen prey to the same vices she cites as being present in the Wharton community – self interest, using ‘friends’ for personal gain, not revealing conflicts of interest (when passing along her article in BW forum). In the end, this article has indeed exposed something. We’re just not so sure it has much to do with MBA students.