PWC To Probe Bloch Rankings Scandal

The university did not provide to Poets&Quants an earlier and more defiant statement that it had released to the Star. That statement, made through a university spokesperson, stated that,  “We have not violated the public trust; we say this with confidence, based on multiple reviews of these issues conducted in academic circles long before the Kansas City Star became involved — reviews that found these criticisms to be without merit. The newspaper chose to ignore the extensive evidence we have provided to them of both the previous investigations into these charges, and of the many highly regarded world-class programs at the Bloch School.”

The Star reviewed thousands of pages of internal UMKC documents obtained through an open-records request, and interviewed scores of faculty and administrators. The reporters wrote that they discovered a number of embellishments designed to boost the Bloch School’s reputation. “Among them were inaccuracies and mischaracterizations of fact in the data the university supplied to the Princeton Review, which has awarded UMKC’s entrepreneurship program high rankings in four of the past five years,” according to the newspaper.

A STUDY THAT SHOWED THE SCHOOL TO BE AHEAD OF HARVARD, STANFORD & MIT

But the most fascinating part of the series turned on an academic study—published in 2011 in the Journal of Product Innovation Management—ranked the business school ahead of Harvard, Stanford, MIT and other elite universities in innovation management research. That is a hot area in business these days because it is the study of how entrepreneurs turn ideas into thriving companies. The study, however, was written by two Chinese authors as visiting scholars at the Bloch School when the paper was written. The relationship between the university and the authors was undisclosed when the study was published. When it came out, the university wasted no time promoting the news. It crowed about the achievement in a news release, and the university chancellor even appeared at a formal announcement of the ranking, telling a crowd of people, ““Oh my, have we made a big score.” Yet, the authors of the paper had been at Bloch for a year, having been invited by then Dean Tan and professor Michael Song. The authors had been at the same Chinese university where Song had been a part-time professor the previous four years, and at UMKC, the three shared the same office number, according to The Star. No less crucial, to get the business school it’s number one ranking, the authors had to use an unusual methodology of counting citations in scholarly articles that has led some critics to charge that the paper is “fatally flawed.” ‘WE ALL KNEW THAT THIS WAS BULLSHIT’ “They named themselves the No. 1 in innovation technology,” former Ph.D. candidate Xian Cao told The Star, “but I don’t really believe it.” A professor who feared that speaking out would harm his career said he and his colleagues were skeptical even as the study’s results were announced. “We all knew that this was bullshit,” he told the newspaper. “We knew that UMKC was not better than MIT and Stanford.” A spokesperson for the university could not say how long the PWC review will take. DON’T MISS: THE DARK SIDE OF MBA RANKINGS