Harvard Business School attacked

The New York-based English writer Philip Delves Broughton (pictured) has ruffled feathers with his insider’s account of Harvard Business School, where he took a masters degree. In his book, Ahead of the Curve, Delves Broughton describes HBS as a place where the stress of competition is always present and calls it "a factory for unhappy people". "I say in the book again and again," he says in an interview with the Boston Herald, "that’s just a wretched way to live, a wretched way to run a school. We're all grown-ups by this point, and we shouldn't all be comparing ourselves to each other, and they do that incessantly."

That said, Delves Broughton, a regular contributor to The First Post, also touches on the party life of some MBA students, describing former investment bankers downing vodka from a booze luge and "pimp parties". Of this, he says: "If you're a 27-year-old who spent five years at Goldman Sachs, you have some money in your pocket and you think you're going back into a world where you’ll make a ton more money - two years at business school is kind of like a vacation. And I know many who treated it like that."

Harvard is upset. Says a spokesman: "Since the classroom here is regarded as a safe haven for learning through intense and spirited daily discussions - a private space for both teachers and students - and since everyone on this campus is well aware of that community standard, there is a certain amount of disappointment that Mr Broughton chose to violate that trust.” The book is published in Britain next week by Penguin, under the title: What They Teach You at Harvard Business School: My Two Years in the Cauldron of Capitalism.