Published on: November 5, 2026 at 9:16 am
The guest essay in The New York Times—with the title “I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down.”—by Academy of Management Scholar Chris Marquis of the University of Cambridge Judge Business School certainly ruffled some feathers. Great! We need to keep talking about business education: the harm it has done and continues to do, what can and has been done about it, and what is still left to do.
There is nothing particularly surprising in Marquis’s essay. Academics have been discussing the dire state of business education for many years, including through books such as Shut Down the Business School: What’s Wrong with Management Education by Martin Parker and Dark Academia: How Universities Die by Peter Fleming.
What is new about Marquis’s essay is the overwhelming response that it has triggered. The question of whether business schools should be abolished seems to have provoked a stronger uproar than the actual closure of entire departments in the arts and humanities at prestigious institutions worldwide. While Marquis’ essay offers a clear provocation intended to push the sector toward critical inquiry and fundamental redesign, the redundancies faced by thousands of academics—justified by the very market-oriented, profit-focused logics taught in business schools—are a grim reality.
Nonetheless, I see the stir provoked by this essay as a promising sign. The NYT piece has brought the debate to a positive tipping point: When everyone is talking about it, the problem can no longer be ignored.
There are two main issues with business education today. The first one, paradoxically, relates to business schools’ ignorance about business. Too many business schools still identify business with only one specific form of enterprise: the for-profit, shareholder owned, private corporation. Ask students—not to mention many professionals—to imagine a business, and a corporate giant is usually the first thing that comes to mind. Yet, business is so much more than that; as Marquis highlights, it also includes social enterprises, cooperatives, community interest companies, and so forth.
Some of the disgruntled commentaries that followed in the wake of Marquis’s essay defend universities’ pursuit of profit, arguing that profit produces positive societal outcomes, and even cooperatives and social enterprises need a positive balance sheet to stay afloat. What critiques such as this miss is the difference between for-profit, not-for-profit, and no-profit. Not-for-profit businesses do need to make a profit, of course, but profit is a means to achieve social and ecological goals, not the primary end goal itself. Business schools cause harm when they tout for-profit enterprises as the only alternative, instilling in students the belief that a business’s only purpose is to maximize shareholders’ profit and “greed is good.” What if they taught how to create and lead businesses that are regenerative and distributive by design? Many lecturers do this already, but we must make plurality in types of businesses become the norm, not the exception.
The second important problem relates to business schools’ short-sightedness. Important work is already pushing business education away from a narrow focus on quarterly returns toward a concern for future generations’ well-being, and beyond a company-centric perspective toward a more systemic, social and ecological approach. However, a lot more work needs to be done. Too many business schools today still operate in a silo, treating the natural environment as an externality or a mere business opportunity or resources to exploit. Marquis’s essay only briefly mentions this, despite it being the most important existential threat for business schools. Just as there would be no business on a dead planet, there would be no business schools. What if we learned more from the natural sciences and taught issues of habitat conservation, limits, biomimicry, and resilience as part of the core curriculum?
We must not let the dust settle on Marquis’s essay and move on but rather continue to push for transformation of business schools. Is the time ripe for change? The overwhelming response to his words suggests the answer is yes.
