The media, from my layman perspective of Chomsky and Herman’s central point, is a business. Like any business, it operates to generate a profit. Anything that acts against that fundamental premise isn’t tolerated within its system. Like an ecosystem that works to destroy a threatening virus, stories that dissent against the media’s main drivers of profit (thus the elite that gain the most from its prosperity) simply aren’t tolerated.

Chomsky and Herman are saying that it’s simply a systems issue with the media: resources are funneled toward their prime purpose. It creates a set of filters that allow or disallow stories to be told. Again, disagree with their findings. But the idea that there isn’t a backroom group of people that make decisions based on political agendas is helpful when looking at governing systems in general.

Like any enterprise, business schools are governed by a system. We can split hairs about the exact nature of their system, but one thing is certain. For many business schools, rankings help define it.

Rankings create a set of criteria that business schools must pay attention to. They play an influential role in determining where a b-school’s scarce resources are funneled. I’ve played the rankings game as a marketing professional for a business school and I have no ax to grind with the process. I remain convinced that activities related to garnering a ranking aren’t altogether antithetical to an educational mission. Especially in a business school, where things like understanding customer needs, returning fair value, and demonstrating measurable results are taught as keystones for successful enterprise management.

But I’ve come to wonder about one very important ranking criteria, and if it helps define a system that is opposed to empowering success among students who wish to exit as entrepreneurs or free agents: Placement and salary data.

To one degree or another, all major b-school rankings factor exiting placement and salary data in their evaluations. For Forbes, it’s just about everything. For Business Week, it’s about 10% of the calculation. (Entrepreneur magazine is one obvious exception.)

So it reasonably follows that business schools place a strong emphasis on post-graduation placement of their students. Without a definable job, there’s no salary data. And the higher the average salary, the higher the ranking.

You could argue that a career services function is also a response to what most students want from their school in the first place. Which is true. But if serving students is the pure motivation behind these staffed services, you’d see equally resourced advice centers for going it on your own.

Which you don’t. Even Babson – the gold standard for entrepreneurship education – doesn’t seem to offer much beyond the typical career services. I could certainly be wrong, but research during my tenure as a marketing professional for a b-school didn’t turn up much differentiation.

I’d argue that up and down the decision chain, business schools allocate resources, design degrees, craft curriculum, and hire faculty and staff in service to helping their graduates get jobs. Measurable and definitive, high-paying J-O-B-S’s. And in my experience, rare is the person within the b-school halls forthcoming with advice to not be tempted by a steady paycheck. To start your own venture. To break out on your own and work as a free agent.

So I wonder to what degree a b-school’s system—in no small part defined by rankings—contributes to their inability to teach entrepreneurship. Is this important in the larger dialog? Is it as much, more, less a factor than Saras D. Sarasvathy’s work on the inherent difficulties in delivering codified knowledge about something as contextual as entrepreneurship? More than the specific topics on which they focus? The inability of left-brain directed institutions to embrace the entrepreneur’s most critical strength: creativity?

I’ve shot a few emails out to some folks involved in this world to chime in—I hope we hear from them. What do you think?

If you want some gold today, you don’t settle in a quaint mountain town in the Rockies filled with scrappy boot strappers singing Colorado My Home Sweet Home in hopes of discovering a nice little vein you can claim.

Too many people have done that already.

To get some gold today, you gotta find it and figure out how to do operations in the furthest flung corners of the earth. In the Andes on the Chilean-Argentinean border. In the Kyrgyz Republic just north of the China border. Or maybe North of Cajamarca, Peru.

You blast and scrape gaping pits out of the ground. It leaves a bit of a mark: If your pit is the largest, it’s square footage will be four times the size of Manhattan’s.

After clear cutting and scarring roads through the terrain to get them there, you use those truly uncanny haul trucks that you see in environmental scare documentaries to move the raw earth you dig up. The shoulder of a six-foot man comes to its wheel hub. Your mine pit miniaturizes them like a model scene on the set of a Terminator movie.

You chunk, grind and mash your raw earth into a fine mud using machinery of the kind that could fill an entire chapter in a Robert Kennedy Jr. book.

Then you dump a bunch of cyanide over the mud to get the gold out. And the used cyanide has to go somewhere. Preferably not in the clean water lake behind the dam you’ve created for your grinding and mashing and mud-making operations. So you build another dam and try to convince everyone that pouring cyanide and sulfur dioxide in there —open to the atmosphere—actually makes it inert. That it’ll be okay for generations that come after the mine closes*.

If your mine is really kickin’, you’ll get seven ounces of gold for around every 30 tons of earth you process. More than likely you’ll get one or two ounces. Maybe.

So what on earth was the Daniels College of Business thinking? A world-ranked business school that’s built a reputation on ethics is going to deliver a class that teaches sustainable development by working in partnership with Newmont Mining. Really.

Then again, like other b-schools it could have looked at Honda Hybrid market development. WalMart eco-friendly fleet renovations. Replacing standard light bulbs with fluorescents in Sears stores. Where’s the fun in that? Or, more to the point, where’s the learning in that?

This class will work hands-on and on location in the mud, dust, extravagance, and chemicals that is the gold mining business. With a company that’s had their share of troubles. Not the least of which includes a few employees actually jailed in Indonesia under charges of polluting an area bay.

So what will Newmont teach us? Should we even bother? Can gold mining even be green? I suppose this could all be a PR stunt on Newmont’s part. Maybe partnering in such ways with third party organizations will bring them good press (if I was their PR consultant, that’s exactly what I’d advise they do).

Agree with former CEO Wayne Murdy’s accolades? Think all that glitter is gilded? Think Newmont—and the gold industry in general—is the evil corporate empire writ large?

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* (This is a communications issue, by the way. This is exactly how to make it inert. Get geeky about cyanide and check out this article.)

The task is ungraspable. Items on an endless to-do list: Energy needs. Relocating multiple villages, maybe 10,000 people. Roads and access concerns. NGO buy-in. Still not sure if local Chiefs will give their approval (despite not having de facto governance, politicians and enterprises must have their buy-in). Locations of sustainable farm training facilities. Evaluation of available and competent labor. Evaluation of available and competent ex-pat labor.

Oh — and is there enough gold in the ore samples to be profitable.

What also struck me was the water needs. One Newmont engineer told me he’s struggling with a solution to re-routing rivers and streams for the water supply. You need a lot of water to mine gold. A fresh and plentiful water supply for two lakes: a clean one for the water needs of the processing operations, and another to mix with the used cyanide and sulfur dioxide in the destruction process.

It was time for a beer in Newmont’s temporary encampment. A small little oasis, oddly. Reliable electricity, running water. Air conditioning. A small bar. A far cry from the mud huts and lean-to shanties we toured all day. If this is what Newmont can build temporarily, their fully operational mine must be a wonder. (We’ll see that next week.)

The beer was good. Scott McLagan, the lead professor and the Director of the executive programs at Daniels, had just debriefed the student teams. They were wandering a bit—trying to find focus for their projects. A balance of academic requirements and delivering something of value for Newmont. Measuring sustainable development efforts and the development of a Ghanaian foundation.

Not exactly a multiple choice exam.

“There’s no book for this stuff,” Scott told me. “Newmont is doing completely new things in Africa. Sustainability on this scale, and this integrated, is totally new.”

The African earth isn’t the only ground Newmont’s breaking. They’re working with a model of sustainability similar to what Daniels teaches. A nice alignment with the Newmont approach of juggling multiple systems. But charts and theories are eaten alive by the doing.

“Learning happens at the extremes,” Scott continued. “Think about it: Newmont’s business model is as complex and capital intensive as they come. Most of their workforce is overseas in multiple and remote locations. They arrive in the sticks of Ghana like an alien race. They promise new wealth creation, but a huge environmental impact.

“And they’ll have to move people who have lived here for generations. How do you value sustenance farming land? By the market value? That’d be next to nothing. And what happens when a financial wind fall comes to someone who’s never known financial management?”

I point out that that doesn’t even touch the environmental stuff. Like diverting streams.

“Or government stuff,” he says, practically brushing off green as if it’s the easiest part. “Newmont wants to be invited back. Where do they draw the line between good citizenship—building a public bathroom or a school is a rounding error in their corporate budget. But is that their job? Their duty to the shareholders?”

I look over my beer and around the bar. No students. They’re at work in their teams to tackle just these issues. Trying to find focus to their deliverables.

It’s very real to them. They’re on a deadline. A bit extreme.

There appears to be very few international travel classes like this in higher ed. Amanda Pollock, Daniels executive program staff member and the co-brainchild behind the program, is the person who actually makes it all happen. Sold it to Daniels management. Promotes the program. Helps create the curriculum and on-the-ground integration. Books the buses. Brings the gifts to our hosts.

She’s worked in other Universities coordinating travel abroad programs. And she agrees.

“Most travel abroad programs are tourist courses. They’re ineffective in delivering any kind of sense of culture, and what its like to do business abroad.

“The goal of this class is create value on multiple levels: a more valuable learning experience for students. Valuable deliverables for partnering enterprises. Valuable research to bring back to Daniels faculty. And sustainable development practices that add value to Africans.”

Ever been on a University international travel course? What’s been your experience?

When you go to fancy-pants MBA school, you learn a lot of fancy-pants terms. It’s nice at first to throw them around and sound smart. Kind of justifies the expense of the degree.

But pretty soon you realize they aren’t that meaningful if (a) they really aren’t communicating anything other than you’re a snotty MBA with some fancy-pants terms, and (b) you really don’t know what it means in the first place.

And by means, I’m talking about the experience of driving through the barely-settled hills of Ghana and happening upon a working gold mine.

Towering processing machinery clustered together, the size of ten, maybe twelve city blocks. Caterpillar’s repair facility four stories high, two football fields long. Security check-points like NORAD. Vehicles zipping about in some presumably rational way, creating traffic like the town square of a small Midwestern town. Compounds of mess halls, pool parlors, the bar, and decent motel-like barracks.

And we haven’t even seen the mine. Or its haul trucks. Or drillers. Or excavators.

Maybe this is what my finance professor meant by Capital Intensive.

When you’re anxious to go on a tour of an African mine site, sitting in a florescent lit room listening to presentations makes you a little jumpy and inattentive. Even so, when Jay Bastian started talking about the mowing operations at his mine, my ears perked up.

In a way, Randy Barnes and Jay Bastian’s relationship is a micro-reflection of Newmont Mining. Randy is the External Affairs Manager at Ahafo. Jay Bastian is the General Manager. Randy, citizenship and social affairs. Jay, operations. Randy, keep the peace. Jay, make the profits.

A few years ago, former Newmont CEO Wayne Murdy approached Scott McLagan — lead professor on this trip and director of Daniels’ executive programs — to help him change the culture at Newmont.

“We’re really good at operations,” Scott will tell you Wayne said. “We know what we’re doing behind the fence line. But I need our people to be spending more than half their time thinking outside the fence line.”

Academics call this focusing on your social license to operate. Newmont calls it profitability.

Newmont engaged Daniels to deliver custom corporate programs on team building, ethics, and sustainability. Multi-week programs, delivered multiple times over the course of several years for all management-level employees flown to Denver from around the world.

Daniels will have you believe that these programs contributed to Newmont’s cultural turnaround. A turnaround that resulted in Newmont’s media placements moving from arrests and water contamination in Indonesia to being placed on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (the first and only mining company with such a listing).

As they say in PR, that’s much better ink.

It’s a turnaround that began by placing Newmont’s Environmental and Social Responsibility managers at the decision making table with operations. They’d have to work hard to align values. A risky proposition for a company (in an industry) that’s always been all about operations.

Jump back to Ahafo. Jay tells our group that it would easier and cheaper to not hire so many people at the Ahafo mine. They employ less people, he said, for much larger operations and more production at their Nevada, U.S. site.

“I could do mowing operations cheaper, faster, and at a higher quality with a tractor than I could hiring a dozen guys with machetes.”

Randy interrupts to remind us that it’s a payoff against being a good corporate citizen. A valued member of the community.

Jay looks at Randy as if to say “That’s nice. Can we get back to operations?”

I wonder how many Newmont shareholders, way back in the comfy environs of the west, have had the same sentiment.