Students arriving at Stanford Business School next fall will discover a new philosophy of curricular freedom and individual choice. Consider this from the Boston Globe:

Starting in the fall of 2007...Stanford's curriculum will be tailored to each student. Students will have no required courses after a common program in the first quarter. Instead, they'll be able to choose from a menu of courses in traditional core disciplines such as finance, operations, and marketing. Students new to the business world can learn the basics of financing in one course, for instance, while hedge fund veterans can explore higher-level issues in another.

In their first quarter, incoming MBA students will take seminars with faculty members who will become their academic advisers and help them assemble a set of electives to cover specialty skills such as negotiations or sectors like healthcare. Stanford also will add a "global context of management" course and underwrite an international studies or internship program for all students in their first year. [....]

Other business school leaders were already buzzing yesterday about the anticipated curriculum changes at Stanford.

"This is clearly a very thoughtful program," said Richard L. Schmalensee, dean of the MIT Sloan School in Cambridge. "We expect to learn from it. Who knows? We may copy some of it."

A freewheeling attitude in California. Whoda thunk it?