Looks like the Business School really did not like the accusations leveled at them in “Inside Job”, the 2010 Oscar-winning documentary about some of the people believed to be accountable for the 2008 financial crisis. The film equally criticized giants of Wall Street and some economists from Columbia, Harvard, NYU, MIT. These academics, including Dean of the Business school R. Glenn Hubbard, were alleged to be concealing conflicts of interest, by accepting handsome payments to advise on public economic issues. The B-School’s new policy changes have clearly been made with the intention of greater transparency.

According to Spec, a new policy, instituted last week, would require B-School professors to “publicly disclose all outside activities—including consulting—that create or appear to create conflicts of interest” in a section in their CV, which is to be updated at least every six months. This section would “list all outside organizations to which [the faculty member] provided paid or unpaid services during the past five years.” Professors are now also required to disclose similar information in their yearly Financial Activity Reports.

Columbia came out very badly in the film (see clip below), where interviews with the faculty got extremely uncomfortable. The Business School likely hopes that this new policy, more rigid than general University policies, will restore some credibility to the school and return it to the halcyon days when all the B-School did was throw parties in Uris and teach kids about the benefits of hygiene.