Here is a quote from a response from Prof. Gavin Kennedy of Heriot Watt's Edinburgh Business School to a question I asked (at the EBS MBA Watercooler) about AMBA accreditation: The prolonged discussions with the officers of AMBA have got nowhere (as distinct from our discussions with fellow 'AMBA' academics who actually run Business Schools). The EBS Board decided to leave matters where they are for a while. AMBA's last proposal was to send two 'experts' (unidentified) and charge EBS a large sum for them to 'inspect' EBS, which seems reasonable until you realise that the invitation was not reciprocated for EBS send its personnel to inspect the two unknown institutions that were to assess EBS and require them to pay a similar sum. Yes, it is a bit farcical but these are the games played by some grown-ups not married to each other. Despite AMBA, under the pressure of events in education, shifting its sacred criteria from fulltime MBAs only, via Part-time and then distance learning and, even more telling, allowing some if its members to run almost the same pedagogy as EBS (though on a much smaller scale) while retaining their AMBA 'accreditation', some of the 'old guard' in AMBA remain unaccountably hostile to EBS, ignore its achievements (over 5,500 MBA graduates since 1992, largely from a segment of the managerial and business population unable, by their history or current work and lifestyles and not their ability, to attend traditional Schools) and insist on fighting EBS on ever narrower and yet more trivial grounds. A most senior academic running a prestigious UK 'AMBA' Business School remarked recently, while reviewing the stalled discussions with us, that he did not think EBS needed AMBA now that it had proven itself and its pedagogy, and that as time went on this would become more and more obvious to all concerned.
