HBS in effect permits their professors more time away, because it counts faculty members’ days away based on the whole calendar year, not just the academic calendar. The Law School and FAS instead calculate professors’ time spent on outside activity in proportion to the nine-month-long school year.

In other words, while FAS allows professors to spend about 36 days engaged in outside activity during the school year, HBS gives their faculty up to 50 days of outside activity during the school year.

Although faculty and administrators throughout the University say that professors’ outside activity has positive effects in how classes are taught, HBS officials claim that it permits 14 more days away for its faculty because the HBS curriculum is so closely intertwined with real life problems in business.

HBS Dean Kim B. Clark ’71-’74 says the mission of the Business school-educating leaders for corporate America—is dependant upon the insights professors gain from work away from HBS.

“By maintaining contact with the real world and the problems faced by corporate executives, professors develop their research with intuition about leadership that comes alive in the classroom,” Clark says.

So the philosophy about time away assumes that while professors talk about management problems in the classroom, they gain firsthand experience when corporations hire them as personal consultants to solve management crises. And while faculty lecture on executive control and procedure, they update their information when they serve on boards of directors or offer expert witness testimony in legal procedures.

University Professor Sidney Verba, whose field is government, sat on the faculty committee that devised the regulations on outside activity and attributes the greater amount of time that HBS professors devote to outside activities to the practical nature of the professors’ research.

“They have some skills to offer people who want them for consultants because they have special skills in running businesses,” Verba says. “I sit in my office all day long waiting for people to ask me to consult,” he adds jokingly.

And it’s not just HBS who wants, and encourages, their professors to get out of the classroom.

Daniel N. Rudolph, chief operating officer and senior associate dean at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, says that it is common for the best business schools in the county to encourage outside activity.

“It creates relationships that can provide us with case materials,” Rudolph says. “Our main goal is helping us get access to companies where we would want to do research that we can then bring back into classroom.”

Following and Enforcing

the Rules