University of Toledo
Students of Brian Anse Patrick are learning how to arm themselves with propaganda from both sides of the debate over how best to apply the Second Amendment. That’s the one that establishes “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” and its application is only bound to get more controversial in the wake of the recent shootings at Virginia Tech.
“American gun policy is a site where many lines of social influence converge,” says Mr. Patrick, an assistant professor of communication who teaches the honors seminar on the subject. His aim, he says, is to help students “understand how information is marshaled, and how it’s focused, and how it’s created to support various political positions.”
At the start of the semester, each student is required to join a gun-policy association of his or her choice as a way to attach them to a community of people active in the debate. Students read and discuss research articles from scientific journals, book chapters, and papers presented at national conferences to understand how each side builds its argument. Throughout the course, politicians and pro- and anti-gun activists are invited to address the class.
“My impression is that people in general believe more about guns and gun policy than they really know,” says Mr. Patrick, who owns several hunting and hand guns. While some of his students did not know anything about firearms before the class, a few were very pro-gun, and “a few are just frightened of guns,” he says. While the issue sparks heated debates across the country, especially now, Mr. Patrick says he asks students to support their opinions with facts, and class discussions are generally very civil.
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Hillary H. Voss, a junior majoring in biology, says besides having two uncles who hunt deer, she had little exposure to guns before the class. But the class has gotten her interested in “going to a shooting range and maybe learning the proper way to handle a gun,” she says. Before taking the class she thought only a small group of “weird and not normal” people liked using guns. “But my eyes have been opened to the millions of people who do this on a regular basis.”
Bruce Kluckhohn for the Chronicle
Bruce E. Roselle (right) runs Roselle Leadership Strategies. His son, Ben, switched from psychology to an M.B.A. program so that he could help run the company: “I had an idea about restructuring it to enable it to grow.”
New M.B.A. programs focus on family businesses
Guns in America: A Reader, by Jan E. Dizard, Robert Merrill Muth, and Stephen P. Andrews Jr. (New York University Press, 1999); The Gun Control Debate: You Decide, edited by Lee Nesbit (Prometheus Books, 2001); The National Rifle Association and the Media: The Motivating Force of Negative Coverage, by Brian Anse Patrick (Peter Lang 2002).
Students write weekly papers responding to readings and must make a final presentation. —Lauren Smith
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Bruce E. Roselle has more than a passing interest in his son’s M.B.A. course work at the University of St. Thomas’s Opus College of Business, in Minneapolis, Minn. The business plan, financing, growth plan, and marketing strategies his son has been plugging away at for the past few semesters could help determine the future of the family’s leadership-development company.
Ben Roselle is pursuing an M.B.A. for the same reason a growing number of students are: to develop the skills they’ll need to help their family’s businesses prosper. Business schools are responding with a flurry of new courses that focus on the unique challenges of homegrown businesses: the patriarch who insists that the approach he inherited from his father works better than any plan a whippersnapper with an M.B.A. could come up
with; the siblings whose squabbling is threatening to sink the business and ruin Thanksgiving, and the brother-in-law with a high-school education who insists he’s management material.
They are also hoping to teach business students of all kinds some of the traits that make many family-run businesses multigenera-tional success stories, the ones whose employees are willing to work long hours for modest pay because they believe in the company and care about their co-workers, and the companies that don’t obsess over quarterly profits as long as their long-term vision remains intact.
Family businesses can range from the mom-and-pop grocery store on the corner to multibillion-dollar corporations like Ford Motor Company or Wal-Mart. They employ 62 percent of the nation’s work force, and
generate about 64 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, according to U.S. Census figures, but until recently, many M.B.A. programs paid scant attention to them.
Arthur Kraft, chairman of AACSB International: the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, said interest in offering courses on family businesses has been growing, often as an outgrowth of programs in entrepreneurship. In addition to M.B.A. programs, many colleges and universities offer undergraduate courses on the subject, and some have institutes that work with local businesses.
The association’s Web site lists nearly 50 colleges and universities with family-business programs in the United States, Canada, and Britain. Among them are Babson College,
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