Written by Dr. Melik Peter Khoury
Christopher Marquis told New York Times readers to abolish business schools. He meant the elite MBA. America’s 368,000 business graduates a year mostly aren’t in it and need better schools
On October 18, The New York Times published a guest essay by Christopher Marquis titled “I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down.” Marquis has spent more than twenty years teaching at Harvard, Cornell, and Cambridge, and his conclusion is that business schools have drifted so far from the public good that they should be abolished.
A day later, he told Poets & Quants that a Times editor chose the headline and that he really wants reinvention. Fair enough. But the essay went well beyond a call for curricular reform, and it is the essay people read.
I have spent much of my career trying to change how universities operate, what they teach, whom they serve, and how they measure success, so I take the argument for institutional reform seriously.
And much of Marquis’s diagnosis is correct. Business education has become too preoccupied with rankings, compensation, consulting placements, and shareholder returns; too many programs treat environmental and social consequences as side issues rather than part of competent management; and we have rewarded institutions for producing graduates who earn extraordinary salaries without asking much about what those graduates contribute.
But there is something remarkable about a professor whose career has been concentrated at three of the world’s most prestigious universities concluding that an entire field should be dismantled because the model he knows has failed. Nor is the idea new. Martin Parker published a book called Shut Down the Business School in 2018, and eight years later we are having the same argument with a bigger megaphone.
What if business education can change, and the institutions with the most resources have simply grown comfortable explaining why change is necessary while leaving the system largely intact? That is the conversation I want to have.
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