I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down
By Chris Marquis
This fall, another cohort of ambitious young professionals has arrived at business schools around the world for two-year programs with price tags in the six figures. Their presence at some of the nicest and shiniest buildings on campus renews a familiar question: What exactly is an M.B.A. for?
Business schools have always struggled to justify their place in the university. A medical school’s core justification is health, and a law school’s is justice — undisputed public goods. Business schools are organized explicitly around a private good: the pursuit of profit. The American sociologist Thorstein Veblen identified this tension a century ago, criticizing university schools focused on commerce because they “need imply nothing in the way of serviceability to the common good.”
When schools like Wharton and Harvard Business School were established, they were seen as overly vocational, and to build legitimacy their founders framed management as a profession, on par with law and medicine. But education in those fields rested on established bodies of knowledge — centuries of case law, natural sciences like biology — that management lacked.
The solution, devised in the 1920s by the Harvard dean Wallace Donham, was to borrow the teaching style used in law and medicine: the case study. It became the signature method of business education. To this day, professors assign 10- to 20-page descriptions of business challenges culminating in a decision point that students then debate in class. The method is pervasive: In 2024, Harvard Business School sold nearly 17 million case studies to various business programs around the world
One well-known case study that I have taught many times is “Rob Parson at Morgan Stanley.” The facts are simple enough to produce a lively classroom debate. Mr. Parson has delivered impressive results and is viewed as a star performer, but his abrasive and go-it-alone style has alienated people across the firm. In the classroom, students take the position of his manager, Paul Nasr, and decide whether to promote him, delay the promotion or push him out.
Nearly three decades after publication, it remains among H.B.S.’s most widely used cases, and the dilemma is enduring: Should results be rewarded even when the person producing them damages the culture around him? In class, students vote on Mr. Nasr’s options and often role-play the difficult conversation between him and Mr. Parson. The discussion can be dramatic, engaging and effective.
But my experience has shown that by asking students to inhabit Mr. Nasr’s role, the case study narrows their imaginations to the decision facing one senior manager. Deeper questions — like whether Mr. Parson is himself a product of investment-banking culture — are rarely raised. Mr. Parson becomes an individual problem, when the larger issue may be an industry that rewards rainmaking, hierarchy and masculine performance norms, then acts surprised when they cause conflict.
When the case method is used in medicine and law, it serves a different set of goals. Medical students work through detailed patient scenarios — symptoms, test results, histories and social and economic context. Law students read real court opinions, dissecting facts, arguments and judgments. In both fields, students are confronted by the messiness of reality, and the goal is to foster disciplined skepticism: ask what’s missing, challenge assumptions and test how an analysis could be wrong.
Business school cases operate on another logic, focused not on inquiry but on decision making. H.B.S.’s own overview of the method describes students imagining “themselves in the decision-maker’s role” and “taking decisive action.” The point is to practice acting like the person in charge — or, as George W. Bush, a graduate of Harvard Business School, put it, “the decider.”
By overestimating the importance of individual decision makers, the business school classroom avoids harder questions: Who made this person the legitimate protagonist? Whose knowledge is absent? Why are workers, regulators, communities, ecosystems or citizens rarely given equal standing?
I wrote dozens of case studies during my decade at H.B.S., some of which are described as classics and best sellers. These are not products of independent research, but carefully packaged corporate narratives. The disclaimer printed in tiny type on every H.B.S. case concedes this point: Cases “are not intended to serve … as sources of primary data.” The data they include can be selective, biased or even fabricated.
For the many cases I wrote under the guidance of senior faculty members, events that reflected poorly on the company were softened or omitted and the roles of certain executives were burnished. The companies held final approval, with drafts reviewed by their lawyers and P.R. staff. Rather than being vehicles for disinterested learning, as one might expect at a university, the case studies end up as instruments of reputation management.
Corporate influence feeds a larger problem: The cases almost always feature winners, making it easy to mistake luck or timing for a proven strategy. Failures, dead ends and nonmarket solutions are rarely considered. Before Enron’s fraud was exposed, its business model was presented in admiring terms by at least five H.B.S. case studies. More damning still, the strategies that later led to its collapse — its asset-light model, its trading platform — were portrayed as innovations. Questions about deregulated energy markets, revolving-door oversight and opaque accounting went unasked.
Furthermore, edits that push the case narratives away from reality are often meant to make it “work” in a classroom. Complexity is systematically shaved away, and dissenting voices often go unheard. Real organizations don’t move in clearly delineated phases toward a decision point, but business school teaching materials often do — compressing timelines, dropping messy subplots and smoothing over contradictions to produce clean narrative arcs and satisfying problems to debate.
The result is a curriculum built around false narratives. Some of the most celebrated ideas in management have not been the ones that survived peer review or replication, but the ones that could be turned into TED Talks, consulting frameworks or airport best sellers. Faculty members are rewarded not for knowledge but for performance — selling a big idea with a memorable label that promises “success” or “disruption.”
Business schools have a divided mission: They seek to legitimize an economic system focused on private gain while also developing guardrails to tame it. They found a remarkable way to manage this tension: the “win-win” story in which the conflict between private gain and public good simply evaporates.
A classic win-win is the contention that environmental programs like reducing waste or using LED lights can save money or that decent pay and benefits lower costs by reducing employee turnover. Business schools now claim to educate “leaders who make a difference in the world,” as H.B.S. proclaims in its mission, while Wharton pursues a “quest for positive global impact.”
These aspirations are built on the delusional but widely accepted idea of “stakeholder capitalism”: that companies can produce climate stability, fair wages, healthy communities and functioning democracies while also delivering profits. Executives promise that technology will solve our environmental problems; voluntary measurement systems are offered as appropriate alternatives to public accountability; ethics is rebranded as competitive advantage rather than moral obligation.
During the 2010s, stakeholder capitalism was quickly woven into M.B.A. syllabuses. But when researchers examined whether the corporations that signed on to a statement pledging commitment to this ethos actually changed their behavior on wages, investment, governance or climate, they found little evidence of a shift. The statement was less a new doctrine than an effort at reputation management — and a ploy to avoid oversight.
Recent evidence shows that many foundational studies supporting the win-win idea were based on flawed data or couldn’t be replicated. Yet faculty members keep researching, writing about and teaching the topic — suggesting an ideological project more than an academic exercise.
Much of what has happened in business schools turned out to be the leading edge of a broader transformation: the corporatization of the university itself. Institutions now chase rankings, donors and corporate partnerships, tout their contributions to innovation and growth and treat everything else as overhead. Students are “customers,” and the degrees are “products” with greater and lesser “market shares.” University strategic documents talk about “brand positioning” for departments and “R.O.I.s” on tenure lines.
Once you accept this frame, it becomes hard to defend the existence of a philosophy seminar or a history department for any reason other than the revenue it generates. The hiring of non-tenure-track adjunct professors follows: If education is “content” delivered to fee-paying “customers,” why keep full-time scholars on the payroll when you can hire contingent, low-wage instructors?
Business schools’ success in placing their graduates in high-paying jobs boosts their rankings; high rankings attract more applicants and allow higher tuitions; and wealthy alumni fund new programs and buildings that elevate the school’s status. It is a self-reinforcing cycle — a flywheel, in M.B.A. parlance — that pulls money, attention and legitimacy away from the disciplines best equipped to question this logic: history, philosophy, sociology, political theory.
The university’s capacity to cultivate historical memory, moral judgment and democratic imagination is weakened, even as its capacity to churn out data analysts, financial engineers and “innovation” managers grows. The irony — and danger — is that in the age of A.I., the thinking fostered in the arts and humanities is increasingly urgent. The domination of business schools is not only physical and financial; it is intellectual, and it is crowding out liberal education.
I’ve come to a grim conclusion: The problem with business schools is not repairable misalignment but the design itself. Business schools are not malfunctioning institutions; they are highly efficient machines doing exactly what they were designed to do. An ethics elective here, a sustainability center there, a “responsible leadership” badge — they all serve to legitimize the machine, not change its output.
The most honest solution I’ve come across is to replace the category entirely. Stuart Hart, an emeritus professor at Cornell and an early sustainability champion, told me he reached that conclusion after trying every internal route to make M.B.A. curriculums more responsible. The institution itself was the problem. At the University of Vermont, Dr. Hart has since developed a new form of business degree focused on societal impact — a small but concrete test of the case for starting over. In this program, sustainability is not a lone elective but run through the whole curriculum, and students spend the summer embedded in a mission-driven company.
What would that clean-sheet logic mean across an entire university? One starting point is the organization theorist Martin Parker’s call to create “schools for organizing” rather than schools for business, centered on how humans coordinate for shared ends. Students would study co-ops, unions and social movements alongside the shareholder corporation. The central question would shift from “How do we maximize shareholder value?” to “How do different forms of organization distribute power, risk and reward — and which should we strengthen?”
Dismantling the business school as a single high-status silo that professionalizes private gain may seem a heavy lift. But universities can create cross-disciplinary pathways for students who want to work in business without submitting them to the business school worldview. Some already offer “business and society” majors or master’s programs in organizations and public purpose, drawing on sociology, law and public policy. The point would not be to abolish the study of markets, but to return it to settings where questions of power, history, democracy and ecological limits cannot be so easily avoided.
For most of my career, I’ve taught electives focused on responsible business and sustainability — gratifying work, but largely preaching to the converted. Recently, at Cambridge, I introduced a required sustainability course filled with future bankers, consultants and tech executives who once would have steered clear.
Many arrive deeply skeptical, convinced that any time a corporation acts in a responsible way it must be a marketing ploy; some push back hard on ideas they see as threats to growth. But forcing them out of their bubbles into a shared conversation about the natural environment, inequality and discrimination has produced the kind of debate that is so often missing in education today.
This is not enough. One required course cannot redeem the business school model. If anything, teaching it has intensified my disappointment. The course is relegated to the very end of the program — a telling signal of its importance — and amid a growing backlash against sustainability, there is some pressure to reduce or eliminate the class, to appease the customers who now drive decisions in higher education.
Still, the experience has reminded me why abolishing business schools cannot mean abandoning the people in them. The goal is not to write off the students as aspiring selfish capitalists; it is to stop funneling them through a machine that narrows their sense of possibility. Many of my students arrive on campus wanting to work on the crises that our economic system has created. What they lack is an institution that is worthy of their better impulses.
