JUST PLANE CULTURE


By Patrick Kinane M


erriam-Webster’s dictionary defi nes arrogant as, “having or showing the insulting attitude of people who believe that they are better, smarter


or more important than other people.” We have all run into arrogant people and our fi rst encounter was probably in academia. Intellectual arrogance was a major concern in a 1984 study of American graduate business students and in an earlier study in 1971 of arrogance focusing on the Harvard Business School. We can relate by asking yourself what is your immediate feeling if someone says they are a professor at Harvard, Yale, Oxford or Stanford? Now, what if I said I am a professor at the University of Illinois or Lewis University? Harvard and those other schools carry an attitude of elitism. This attitude is not unique to the professors — it has fi ltered down to the students as well. Arrogance occurs in every occupation and


every profession. A multi-university study assessed more than 500 business students’ perceptions of arrogance in academic, business and professional (non-business) environments. Statistical analyses were conducted to compare students’ views of these diff erent occupational groups (Haan et al, 2007). With what I wrote in the fi rst paragraph, it was revealed that educators were found to be less arrogant than non-educators with college administrators coming in seventh; politicians, lawyers, entertainers, athletes, managers and doctors led the list. That said, it was surprising to fi nd that graduate business students were signifi cantly more arrogant than undergraduate business students, college professors, non-tenured faculty and adjunct instructors. We produce business grad students who are more arrogant than their


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