The subject of entrepreneurship, he says, both requires rigor and permits broad-mindedness. A 1961 MBA from Harvard, Cockrum is a strong advocate of the school's famed case-study method. He calls on students without warning, and if a member of a study group is unprepared to answer, the grades of all students in the group suffer. As entrepreneurial studies have become more popular, they've also become more serious. Students today are less likely to spend a semester listening to war stories from moguls describing how they made it big.
Some schools even give students real money to play with.
And this fall, Washington University's John M. Olin School of Business started a program called ''the hatchery'' that sends teams of students off to consult with entrepreneurs at the start of their ventures. It all marks a newfound respectability for entrepreneurship teaching. Entrepreneurship is a matter of inspiration and guts, they say. Academics, meanwhile, have seen it as an interdisciplinary hodgepodge that does not yield serious research. When Donald Berens, a delicatessen-meat magnate, gave money to the Cornell University Johnson Graduate School of Management for a chair in entrepreneurial studies in 1980, he told administrators he didn't care if the person who filled it had completed seventh grade.