The New College of California has recently launched a “socially responsible and ecologically sustainable MBA program” that aims to fuse “social justice, ecological considerations, and community involvement and alternative forms of management ownership”. John Stanton, the director of the Green MBA program, and Jane Lorand who is faculty at the School, extended an invitation to meet both students and alumni in Santa Rosa. Martha and I made the drive from Sacramento on a spectacular spring day last week.
We decided to go there the “wrong” way and we braved the Silverado Trail, a narrow, ancient, winding road thru the hills that gave us the opportunity of take in the California spring.
John and the students met us initially in town. The first lecture I gave in their classroom, an old railway yard! The evening meeting was in a beautiful student house, in open country, surrounded by fields and trees.
Students and alumni, some 50 of them, had “Ripples” on their study course and the day was therefore more of a “getting to know each other” than a one way lecture. They knew what we were all about and that gave me the possibility of listening to their hopes and to answer their questions. It seemed to me that what is pioneered at the NCC will become the norm throughout the academic world. It is not possible nowadays to do an MBA without understanding the social and environmental implications of commercial decisions. It is equally impossible to conceive of environmental decisions that cannot be financed or even of a personal lifestyle that cannot be sustained for economic reasons.
The Green MBA students are neither hippies nor “wall street” types; they are a new brand of individual for which there is neither name nor stereotype. May they prosper and multiply!
Dr. Ernesto Sirolli
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