Abolish the business school?

A professor’s viral call to shut down business schools sparks a global academic debate

THERE IS AN oft-repeated form of joke among humanities majors (of which I was one) poking fun at the curriculums of our business school colleagues. The most repeated version might be something like this 2019 tweet: “Sometimes on campus you accidentally walk by a business class and the professor is writing ‘profit = revenue – costs’ on the board, and everyone is taking notes like it’s actual school.”

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Everyone chuckles. Back to real book learning for the humanities and STEM students; the comparatively healthy salaries awaiting the biz school grads will more than comfort any bruised egos.

The haters got a boost this month, though, with a provocative essay in The New York Times from University of Cambridge business school professor Chris Marquis, who made a straightforward argument. “I teach at a business school,” the headline read. “It’s time to shut them down.”

Marquis’ argument was not that far off from the kernel at the centre of the campus joke — the premise that while all other disciplines of the academy have loftier, heady goals, business school puts profit at the heart of the curriculum, to the detriment of students and, argued Marquis, society at large.

The backdrop to his argument is that business schools are growing in popularity: nearly one in five U.S. undergrads majors in business. He then points to a 2022 study that found firms that appoint managers with business degrees tend to engage in more cost-cutting and wage reduction than firms without.

“Again and again, I have watched students abandon their altruistic intentions, instead becoming consumed by whether to choose careers in consulting or finance and who will land a summer internship at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs,” Marquis wrote.

He points out that before it was widely derided as a scandal, Enron was a popular Harvard Business School case study subject, still the most common teaching tool. “Rather than being vehicles for disinterested learning, as one might expect at a university, the case studies end up as instruments of reputation management.”

The argument had a lot of business types talking over the past couple of weeks, with some coming to Marquis’ defence, and many defending the institution. Queen’s University’s Wren Montgomery chimed in on LinkedIn, saying she now teaches a required sustainability course.

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“I always say I feel like I am rescuing [students] from a cult,” she says about teaching the course, “and giving them permission to be themselves again.”

Others pushed back. Professor Christopher Stevens wrote in a letter to The New York Times that Marquis may just hate his business school. He assumes that “his experience as a faculty member at three of the most elite (and elitist) institutions in the world reflects the experience of professors and students at schools that look nothing like Harvard, Cambridge or Cornell.”

Of course, business schools are huge draws for some of the bigger schools in North America, and in Canada especially. Which is to say, they ain’t going anywhere anytime soon.

So perhaps the better discussion is about reform, as Franz Heukamp, dean of IESE Business School, wrote: “For me, the question is not whether business schools should exist, as Mr. Marquis suggests, but what kind of leaders they should educate, and how.”