All this expense so that we may teach!

I walked into my Business School building at 6:55 this morning, a Do List hammering me awake. For months, OBTC 2008 programming matters are always among the most demanding "Do's". One has to pause and wonder if all this effort to bring management educators together in June is worth it.

I walked past the empty classroom that my learners and I will bring to life in awhile. This thought crossed my mind. This well heated, well lit, well cleaned, well appointed facility is being paid for by our state, tuition payers, and other benefactors, just so that I may do what I love doing still another Thursday. Teach.

Now, at my desk,looking at this devilishly insistent Do List (we still have a dozen or so of the 213 proposed sessions to decide), it strikes me why we have OBTC, OBTS, the Management Education Journal, and the Academy of Management Education and Learning Journal. How well we teach matters more than ever. Look at how we are being staked to do the job.

Yet, can we possibly be doing what it takes to bring sufficient learning. We may claim sufficiency when we plunk down the A or B; or when we hit the mark of an assessment metric. Yet, who can say that she or he is fully prepared to make those 75 minute engagements on a cold February morning work "well enough"?

Good Lord, if we were to figure out all the it costs - all the way out to debt reduction on the millions this building alone, out of the 70 or so on my regional state university campus, that 75 minutes I will soon fill for the 28 OB learners had better deliver!

So, to the point of OBTS and our annual OBTC's. Several hundred of us sustain a society whose purpose, at least for me, is to thougfully consider pratices which seem to work better than well enough for us with the intention to dissmeninate this as knowledge for use by our peers. Let's see, how long has it been since "pedagogical research" has even been allowed to have a place among listed research attainments on our Promotiona and Tenure vitae? Barely a recent moment or two in my 40+ higher education career.

Yet. Yet! All this expense, more importantly, all this trust, that goes into your abilty to foster not just sufficient, but superb learning, tells me there is hardly anything about management education more important to research and share than what we each must know and do to teach.

Care to comment?