The fix is more pluralism, not less. We should open doors, not close them.
At their best, business schools are where society argues with itself about business.
I n a recent New York Times opinion essay, a professor who has taught at Harvard, Cornell, and Cambridge business schools concludes that business schools should not exist. Business schools, the author Christopher Marquis argues, train students to optimize financial metrics, while workers and communities are ignored. As a result, business programs turn idealistic students who aspire to fix health care or commercialize clean energy into consultants and finance professionals. His verdict: “We don’t need to ‘fix’ business schools. We need to abolish them.”
His essay reflects a mindset that treats profit as evil, corporations as harmful to society, and managers as morally compromised. We are all professors in business-related fields, and we do not deny the importance of teaching future managers about ethics; we each have devoted a considerable portion of our careers to studying corporate social responsibility, stakeholder governance, and the institutional context of markets. We recognize that the normative aspects of capitalism are subtle and complex, and that there are conflicting views of the social and moral responsibility of managers and firms. Critics such as Marquis have a strong, particular view of what managers should do — call it “progressive.” And shutting down the institutions devoted to analyzing and debating these issues leaves students unable to grapple with, and challenge, this progressive mindset.
Studying and teaching business ethics is different from imposing a single moral view of business. A good ethics course asks hard questions. When does profit-seeking create value, and when does it destroy it? What causes profits and losses? When should stakeholder claims constrain shareholders, and when do they become cover for unaccountable managers? What is relative performance of markets and governments? Students should come out of that course with the ability to make the best case for more than one answer, including the answers they deem incorrect. By contrast, the critics’ approach settles these questions before the semester starts, with profit cast as suspect and managers as compromised.
In liberal societies, reasonable people disagree about the purpose of a firm, the legitimacy of profit, and the proper reach of markets. A university should host that disagreement, not close it. Business schools should assign Milton Friedman’s 1970 argument in the New York Times that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. They should also assign stakeholder theory, the critics’ preferred alternative, developed by business school professor R. Edward Freeman.
Marquis himself teaches an essentials of business course in his own institution, and unfortunately, his advocacy for abolition sorts colleagues into the enlightened and everyone else. Those who see markets as engines of opportunity are portrayed, explicitly or by implication, as naïve, ignorant, illiberal, or servants of corporate power. That is not an argument. There is a contradiction between championing openness, plurality, and diversity and simultaneously arguing for abolition, the one option that decisively ends the conversation.
Pitting “society” against companies is a false choice. Companies are one of the main ways a society organizes work, employment, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Most business graduates do not become investment bankers. They run hospital supply chains, keep family firms solvent, manage nonprofits, and start the small businesses that employ their neighbors.
Nor would demand for management education disappear if universities stopped providing it. Business accounts for about one in five American bachelor’s degrees. Close the schools, and that demand will migrate to company-run academies (McDonald’s has operated its training facility “Hamburger University” since 1961) and to credentials designed by employers, for employers. What an irony: Abolishing business schools would put management education directly into corporate hands, which is the exact opposite of what the critics want. In a university, future managers learn alongside economists, historians, and even critics like Marquis. In a corporate-run academy, they would not.
Abolition would also sever a bridge between science and society. Marquis laments that students who arrive hoping to commercialize clean energy leave as consultants. But how do these new environmentally friendly technologies make it from the lab to the market? Discoveries in universities or government labs do not become vaccines, batteries, or drought-resistant crops on their own. Getting them to market requires people who understand how to create and protect intellectual property, find customers for the new technology, finance the new enterprise, comply with regulation, and manage the venture if it becomes a startup. The National Science Foundation recognized this when it created I-Corps, which puts scientists through an entrepreneurship curriculum built on customer discovery. Since 2012, more than half of its 3,200-plus teams — nearly 1,700 — have launched startups, raising $7 billion. U.S. academic institutions formed more than 900 startups in 2024 alone. Business school faculty teach those scientists, mentor those teams, and study what makes university technology transfer work. Remove them, and the gains from publicly funded research will accrue mainly to incumbents large enough to commercialize it in-house.
None of the above arguments places business schools beyond criticism. Rankings distort priorities, curricula can narrow, and career offices can funnel students toward a handful of employers. These are problems of incentives and governance, and thankfully, they have remedies: more viewpoint diversity, more history and institutional economics, more exposure to entrepreneurship, more attention to whom managers are accountable and why. The fix is more pluralism, not less. We should open doors, not close them.
Finally, a business school professor can publish a call to abolish business schools in the New York Times and keep his job. That freedom is the pluralism worth defending. At their best, business schools are where society argues with itself about business. Keep the argument. Keep the schools.
Per Bylund is associate professor and Johnny D. Pope chair in the School of Entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University. Enrique Escalante is associate professor of Economics at Angelo State University. Nicolai Foss is professor of strategy at the Department of Strategy and Innovation at the Copenhagen Business School. Peter Klein is W. W. Caruth chair and professor of entrepreneurship at the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University. Samuele Murtinu is professor of international business at the Utrecht University School of Economics. Donald Siegel is Regents Professor of Public Policy and Management in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University. Siri Terjesen is associate dean and professor at Florida Atlantic University.