When Professor Doron Nissim lectures on today’s topic-liabilities and contingencies-the sound of his voice and the din of keyboards are nicely complemented by occasional electronic beeps and dings. Perhaps some of the students are taking notes on their laptops-a requirement at Columbia’s B school, where tuition is $29,000 a year. But in my immediate vicinity, that’s not what’s going on. Niraj Gupta, for instance, is reading The Wall Street Journal online with ESPN.com open in a second window. As Nissim steers the lecture toward amortization and effective rates, Gupta is checking the weather forecast. When Nissim introduces a case study on Mail.com, Gupta fires off an e-mail to his friend Camilla, who’s visiting New York from out of town.
It turns out Gupta, a first-year student, still has a lot to learn. It’s the second-year students, upstairs in a class called Tax Factors in Business Decisions, who know how a wired classroom really works. During the class, Doug Pagan checked the markets, bought about $4,000 worth of stock on E*Trade, planned a trip to Europe for the summer, bid on tickets to London on Priceline.com and exchanged e-mails with his realtor about a condo he’s buying in Hoboken, N.J. “If you have a short attention span,” says Pagan, “it gives you something to do during class that’s not overly disruptive.”
Katherine Yang, a second-year, adds that the high-speed T-3 connection provided in business-school classrooms is far more convenient for online shopping than her connection at home. “I’m doing all of my bridal registry at the WeddingChannel.com during class-dishware, flatware, everything.” In the past, she’s used lecture time to buy cat-box litter, milk, clothes and, before the unfortunate collapse of Pets.com, shoes for her 150-pound Spanish Mastiff whose feet are prone to infection. “You get such great discounts on the Web,” she says.
Unlike Ian Ayres, the Yale University law professor, who last week wrote a New York Times op-ed piece essentially accusing his students of laptop abuse, professor Nissim only shrugs. “These are highly motivated students,” he says. “If they understand the material, I don’t mind if they surf.”
Todd Lundell, a second-year Columbia law student says students are careful not to be rude. “Solitaire and Free Cell are fine for class-they’re easy. But chess? You can’t pay attention and play chess at the same time.”
Recent events have posed some challenges for the grad school students. “The demise of Napster was really a tragedy for us,” says Spencer Lee, who used to spend classes downloading MP3 remixes of Britney Spears’ “Oops, I Did it Again.” Lee has consoled himself by using the T-3 connection to download the entire film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” which he occasionally watches during class.
Luckily, the students have one another to help them through these rough spots: “The instant chatting we did during first-year classes brought us a lot closer,” says Yang. One such bonding activity was organizing the Wave during class over instant messaging, and having it circle through the auditorium.
If all this sounds like slacking off, consider that President George W. Bush, as governor of Texas, scheduled time during his seven-hour workday for a few games of video golf and computer solitaire. Since Bush considers himself America’s highest-ranking CEO, this business school training may be the perfect grooming for future leadership.
