They say that mud sticks – when a person or organisation is vilified people remember it. But does this matter for a business school? If so, what can a school do about it and should students and alumni care?
In recent years these questions may well have been a topic of conversation in the offices of several prominent business schools.
In January a professor at Harvard Business School, Ben Edelman, published a blog describing his most recent paid consultancy work, which outed what he said to be the use of secretly intrusive “adware” by Blinkx, the online video search company, something the company strongly denies. “If I traded in the companies I write about (I don’t!), I’d be short Blinkx,” Prof Edelman concluded.