Class Conflict

Braving a cold rain, some 200 students at Yale University’s School of Organization and Management abandoned their studies last week for an old- fashioned protest rally. The target of their angry slogans: a campaign by Yale president Benno Schmidt to push the innovative but troubled business school into the mainstream of M.B.A. academies. Said Jane Melvin, a first-year student: “This amounts to a hostile takeover of the school.”

Hostile or friendly, Schmidt’s proposals indicated that he thought the school deserved a resounding F. Declaring that the twelve-year-old institution “was not reaching its potential,” he abruptly named a new dean: Michael Levine, 47, a tough-minded professor of management studies who was formerly chief executive of New York Air. Levine, whom Schmidt chose without consulting the faculty search committee, succeeds economist Burton Malkiel, 56, who resigned last year after strengthening the school’s economics program. Schmidt is slashing the popular department of organizational behavior, which teaches the techniques of compromise and consensus building, by declaring that six junior faculty slots will be phased out over the next five years.

Since it was founded in 1976, Yale’s program has assumed the unusual role of training both future corporate leaders and government and nonprofit administrators. While that will continue, Schmidt plans to focus on traditional teaching methods. He hopes to end a debilitating feud between professors of standard academic subjects such as finance and accounting and those, chiefly in organizational behavior, who emphasize role playing and the importance of human relations in settling disputes. “Relations had deteriorated to where faculty members were barely civil to each other,” said finance professor Stephen Ross. After last week’s turmoil, a new class in compromise might be welcome.