Trinity Business School’s dean: ‘AI brings a huge threat to people’s ability to learn and to upskill. The threat is that we will deskill’Prof Laurent Muzellec: 'If you come from a background where money is an issue, the number one thing that is going to help you is money.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
One thing that has not diminished over time is the potency of first-hand experiences. Muzellec, who came to Ireland from France 22 years ago, says his mentality shifted after he witnessed the scorched effects of global heating while travelling a couple of summers ago through the heart of Brittany, where tinder-like conditions in the normally wet region had facilitated the spread of an intense blaze. The Monts d’Arrée, usually as green and temperate as the Wicklow mountains, were burnt up.
“From a business school point of view, if you had asked people in the late 1990s and early 2000s what they want to do in their life, they would have told you that they want to be a brand manager for Guinness or for a big consumer brand like that, or some people might have said they want to work for KPMG or one of the big consulting companies,” he says.
Muzellec, born in Brest in Brittany to a middle-class family, later grew up in Angers in the Loire Valley, where he attended secondary school in a social housing neighbourhood called La Roseraie. One of the legacies of the friendships he made at this time was that social inclusion became “very important” to him personally.
The university’s business student population is now gender balanced, and though he thinks it can be counterproductive to constrain people by their identity, he has noticed that the testosterone-permeated atmosphere of typical master of business administration classes of the past has dissipated as diversity has improved.
“For me rankings are there to validate a strategy. You have a strategy and then if it is a good strategy, rankings will acknowledge this.” Darts trundle along the railway line visible from his glass-walled third-floor office, taking commuters in and out of the city. The door of Trinity Business School – a six-storey, €80 million building officially opened in May 2019 – opens on to Pearse Street, which positions the school between the big tech employers of the Digital Docklands and the historic, multidisciplinary Trinity campus.
Before deciding to do a PhD at UCD, he worked at the French embassy trade office in New York and then as a product manager for a Parisian online mapping start-up. Although the good understanding of academic life he has built up over the past 20 years is obviously vital for his role as dean, it is “certainly no harm” to also have “a modicum of business acumen” from this early phase of his career, he thinks.
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