As a product of a liberal arts education, I have a healthy dose of critical thought coursing through my veins at all times. I can deconstruct and paradigm out with the best of them.

There have been times when I wondered if these skills might just be intellectual… er… self-gratification. But I have come to appreciate the doctrine of thinking broad and asking questions. Not only is it part of my nature (or nurture), but I’m fairly confident that appreciating fact-finding while not taking everything only at face value makes a person more balanced.

Going to business school flew in the face of this part of my world view. Many MBA curricula reinforce the notion that there are always right answers and that smart means you persevere to construct the right model to find them. That’s what makes management more science-y.

Are there right answers and straight lines in life? Yes. But more often than not, there aren’t.

I’ve expressed before on this blog my concern that such an approach produces manufactured and unimaginative thought. Tooliness, if you will. And have been studying a book by a Harvard Business School professor that reveals that people like me, now the outliers in business school, were once embraced by the MBA… er… paradigm (wow, this is the first time I wrote “paradigm” twice in one composition since undergrad).

Recently, the NY Times suggested that liberal arts staples like “multicultural critical theory” may once again become all the rage at post-financial-crisis-thanks-for-effing-up-the-economy-smarty-pants MBA programs. Everything old is new again.