Christopher Marquis ‘s recent New York Times essay calling for business schools to be shut down has sparked an extraordinary conversation across the world of management education. Some have welcomed the provocation. Others have challenged its evidence, assumptions and conclusions. Many recognise the problems but disagree about where they originate, how widespread they are and what should be done. In a subsequent conversation with Poets&Quants, Marquis himself emphasised reinvention rather than the literal disappearance of business schools, pointing towards changes in curricula, faculty incentives and institutional purpose.
Perhaps the provocative headline has already done its work.
At the Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative (GRLI), we have been following the many thoughtful responses with considerable interest. Taken together, they reveal something more consequential than a debate about institutional survival.
They expose different understandings of what business education is for, how it shapes — and is shaped by — the wider world, and what it might actually take to change the systems we have created.
Marquis’s central challenge deserves attention even if we reject his proposed remedy. Business schools do more than respond to the economic system around them. Through the theories they privilege, the cases they teach, the careers they celebrate and the practices they reward, they can also help reproduce its underlying assumptions.
But business schools are neither uniform nor isolated. They operate within wider systems of recruitment, investment, corporate governance, public policy, academic recognition and societal expectations. Changing one part without attending to the others may simply reproduce the same outcomes in a different form.
This is the tension running through the debate.
Are we changing the underlying assumptions, incentives and practices of management education — or becoming increasingly sophisticated at articulating the need for change while continuing to reproduce the conditions that make it necessary?
Five interconnected questions seem particularly worth pursuing.
1. Purpose: What are business schools for — and for whom?
- Gene Anderson asks us to reconsider what business schools were originally established to accomplish, and whether their teaching, research and institutional incentives continue to serve that purpose.
- Vikas Kumar offers an important reminder that management education has not developed everywhere for the same reasons. In India, institutions emerged partly to build national managerial capabilities, strengthen public enterprises and support cooperative development. The history of institutions such as the Institute of Rural Management Anand complicates any universal account of business schools as vehicles primarily for private gain.
- Scott Beaulier offers a different but equally important perspective from Wyoming, where business education can provide pathways to livelihoods, entrepreneurship and opportunities that students’ families may never have had.
- Meanwhile, Philip Kotler proposes widening the conception of management education itself, including preparing people to lead unions, nonprofits, public institutions and other forms of organisation.
These perspectives challenge the assumption that there is, or should be, one universal model of a business school. They also expose a distinction between an institution’s declared purpose and its actual consequences. A school established to advance public development can gradually become preoccupied with global rankings, graduate salaries and prestigious recruitment. Equally, an institution focused on business performance may contribute meaningful capabilities to its surrounding community.
Neither its founding mission nor its preferred description of success tells the whole story.
What if we began by making different institutional purposes more visible, inviting those affected by management decisions into defining them, and examining how schools demonstrate their contribution beyond rankings, salaries and credentials?
And who should have a voice in deciding what that contribution ought to be?
2. Incentives: What do our institutions actually reward?
Perhaps the strongest convergence across the debate concerns the distance between institutional aspirations and the systems that shape everyday decisions.
- Judy Samuelson offers something approaching a generational strategy for change. Drawing on earlier work with finance scholars, she argues that rethinking corporate purpose and shareholder primacy requires more than new courses: it means creating space for different ideas through doctoral education, faculty recruitment, scholarly journals and the finance classroom itself. The intellectual resources already exist; what is needed is the institutional commitment to make them central rather than peripheral.
- Shivaram Rajgopal directs attention beyond the classroom to the incentives and hierarchies inside corporations: remuneration, reporting pressures, board structures and the suppression of dissent. Changing curricula alone will not necessarily change the conditions graduates encounter.
- Witold Henisz connects these concerns by calling for greater accountability for the effects of business on financial, human, social and natural capital — and for changes involving educators, employers, investors, journals, accreditors and policymakers.
- Raul Villamarin Rodriguez turns the question back on business schools themselves: how often do institutions dedicated to teaching critical thinking seriously challenge their own business models?
These concerns are hardly new. In her 2019 Harvard Business Review article, Anat Admati argued that simply introducing more courses on ethics, sustainability or social entrepreneurship would not be enough. Her contribution adds a dimension that is sometimes missing from the discussion: the relationship between responsible business and the institutions of collective responsibility.
Businesses can succeed not only by creating value, but also by shifting costs onto society, exploiting weaknesses in regulation or influencing the rules under which they operate. More responsible managers are essential. But they cannot substitute for legitimate public institutions, democratic accountability, civic responsibility and effective governance.
Nor can we assume that responsibility always produces a convenient win-win outcome. Sometimes responsible action requires accepting constraints, challenging powerful interests or relinquishing an advantage. The distinction matters because business education does not merely prepare people to operate within institutions. It also prepares some of the people who will design, influence and govern them.
And the relationship works in both directions. Corporate incentives shape educational priorities; educational institutions help form the people, ideas and professional practices through which those incentives are sustained. We cannot expect fundamentally different behaviours to become normal while continuing to reward the old ones.
Could we begin identifying the contradictions between institutional purpose and institutional practice — and bring together those capable of changing the incentives, rather than merely the language used to describe them?
3. Becoming: What kind of leaders are we helping people become?
Alongside the institutional questions sits a deeply human one.
- Kim B. Clark asks what kind of people students are becoming through business education. His framework of deep learning — to know, to feel, to do and to become — places character, judgement, care and responsibility at the centre of leadership development.
- Judith Walls emphasises the importance of communities where alternative thinking can flourish, alongside transformative learning experiences that connect students with social and ecological realities.
- Sachin H. Jain, MD, MBA draws attention to moral courage: the capacity to act on what we believe is right even when careers, colleagues and institutional pressures make doing so difficult.
- And Casey Evans reminds us that disciplined scepticism, critical inquiry and the ability to challenge compelling narratives can themselves be essential capabilities developed through management education.
These contributions point towards something deeper than the familiar distinction between technical competence and ethical awareness. The challenge is not simply to ensure students know about responsibility. It is to create educational experiences through which they learn to exercise it — in circumstances involving uncertainty, conflicting interests, institutional pressure and real consequences for others.
This also brings us back to Marquis’s concern about the assumptions embedded in teaching cases. When organisational dilemmas are presented primarily from the perspective of a senior executive, students may learn much about decision-making while implicitly absorbing assumptions about who gets to define the problem, whose interests count and which consequences remain outside the frame.
What happens when employees, communities, public institutions and the natural world are no longer treated merely as background conditions, but as participants in defining what responsible action requires?
And as artificial intelligence increasingly augments analysis, interpretation and decision-making, what responsibilities must remain ours?
The question is not whether students can acquire the right vocabulary. It is whether the experiences through which they learn develop the judgement, relationships, character and courage to act differently.
How might we connect and deepen learning experiences that cultivate the courage to question, the capacity to engage with difference and the responsibility to act — while examining whether these capacities endure beyond the classroom?
4. Evidence: How do we know what is actually changing?
The debate also exposes important questions about causality, comparison and evidence.
- Nicolai J. Foss challenges the leap from identifying institutional shortcomings to advocating abolition. Alternative arrangements, he argues, deserve the same scrutiny as established business schools. His challenge is fundamental: compared with what? Would new schools of organising escape pressures from funding, careers, institutional reputation and ideological conformity? Or would they encounter different versions of familiar problems?
- Prof. dr. Koen Pauwels raises questions about selection and causality. Do graduates behave as they do because of business education, because of the values and ambitions they bring into it, or because of the organisations they subsequently join?
- Gad Levanon adds a labour-market perspective, highlighting differences in how the appeal of postgraduate business education is changing across groups of US university graduates. The pattern deserves attention, but the underlying causes remain open to interpretation.
These distinctions are valid but should not become excuses for avoiding difficult evidence. Marquis draws attention to research by Daron Acemoglu and colleagues examining the effects of managers’ business education on wages and labour’s share of income. The researchers find lower wages associated with the appointment of business-educated managers, without corresponding improvements in output or employment growth, and present evidence pointing towards the role of practices and values acquired through education.
Findings of this kind deserve careful examination, not dismissal because they challenge our preferred institutional narrative. At the same time, no single study settles the question of what business schools do across different contexts, educational models and organisational environments. Perhaps this is where the debate could become particularly productive.
We know that adding a course does not necessarily transform a curriculum. Changing a curriculum does not necessarily change student aspirations. Developing more responsible graduates does not guarantee that the organisations employing them will reward responsible behaviour.
And creating new institutions does not automatically free them from the pressures affecting existing ones.
Rather than simply collecting examples of good practice, could we learn together how to distinguish genuine transformation from selection effects, institutional rhetoric and well-intentioned activity?
What would count as convincing evidence that the underlying conditions are changing — and what might we learn from initiatives that have struggled, failed or produced unintended consequences?
5. Organising: How do we develop the capacity to act together?
Perhaps the most promising thread moves beyond the business school as an institution and towards the wider capacity of people to organise meaningful change.
- Stephen Taylor makes a compelling case for management education’s ability to bring different disciplines together and translate knowledge into coordinated action. Many of the world’s most difficult challenges require more than specialised expertise. They require people capable of mobilising resources, navigating disagreement, building organisations and sustaining collective effort.
- Sameer Hasija and Mark Stabile emphasise the contribution of rigorous research, practical experience, human judgement and learning across cultures.
- Douglas Hannah offers a useful reimagining of management education as a place for understanding how people organise towards shared ends — whether through businesses, nonprofits, movements, cooperatives or other forms of collective endeavour.
- And Dan Turner reminds us that education should leave students seeing more possibilities for contributing to the world, not fewer.
These perspectives help us see why the response to Marquis need not be confined to defending existing institutions or imagining replacements. The capabilities involved in management and organising are indispensable. But they are not the exclusive property of business schools, nor must they be directed primarily towards corporate advantage.
Indeed, the ability to organise across institutions and sectors may be among the most important capabilities we need to cultivate.
We have many networks, associations, institutions, researchers and practitioners already experimenting with alternatives. Yet their work too often remains scattered, their lessons local and their experiences difficult for others to access or adapt.
What if the opportunity is not to create another universal model, but to connect existing experiments so their learning, relationships and useful practices can travel — without placing them under a single institutional umbrella?
Could the process through which we transform management education itself become an example of more globally responsible organising?
Fourteen years after 50+20: An unfinished transformation
For those of us involved in GRLI, these five threads bring us back to a much older and still unfinished inquiry.
In 2012, GRLI, the (then) World Business School Council for Sustainable Business and the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) collaborated on launching the 50+20 Agenda: Management Education for the World.
Launched at Rio+20, the agenda invited management education to make a fundamental shift: from aspiring to be best IN the world towards seeking to be best FOR the world.
The ambition was not simply to improve business ethics courses or incorporate sustainability into existing programmes.
It envisaged three mutually reinforcing roles for management education:
- Educating globally responsible leaders through transformative, whole-person learning.
- Enabling organisations to serve the common good through relevant research, engagement and new forms of stewardship.
- Engaging in the transformation of business and the economy, including participation in the wider public conversation about the world we are creating.
At its centre was the collaboratory: an open space for inquiry, learning and action in which educators, students, businesses, public institutions, communities and others could engage with real challenges on more equal terms.
The agenda also anticipated changes to institutional governance, research priorities, faculty development, assessment, incentives and the measures by which management education judges its own success.
It recognised the need both to transform established institutions and to experiment with entirely different educational arrangements.
Many of the questions now being raised were therefore already central to a constructive vision articulated fourteen years ago.
But recalling that history should not become an exercise in claiming intellectual precedence. It places a particular responsibility on those of us who have helped advance the responsible management education movement.
How much of the transformation envisaged in 2012 has become embedded in institutional practice — and how much remains a compelling aspiration?
There has undoubtedly been movement. Responsibility, ethics, sustainability and societal impact are more visible in institutional commitments, accreditation expectations, educational offerings and public discourse.
Educators and institutions across the world are experimenting with different forms of teaching, research, governance and collaboration.
But the adoption of the language of responsibility is not equivalent to transformation of an institution’s underlying logic.
A sustainability module does not necessarily change the purpose of an MBA. A declaration of societal impact does not necessarily change whose interests guide institutional decisions. And a new indicator does not necessarily displace the more powerful incentives operating elsewhere.
The responsible management education movement should be no less willing than its critics to examine its own achievements, assumptions and limitations.
From I, to We, to All of Us
For more than twenty years, GRLI has helped keep a fundamental question alive:
What does it mean to be globally responsible?
The Marquis debate returns us to that inquiry, and to the different levels at which responsibility must be developed and exercised.
I — the individual. What kinds of judgement, courage, care and responsibility are we cultivating? How do people learn not only to make better decisions, but to question whose interests those decisions serve and accept accountability for their consequences?
We — the relational. How do we create the trust, learning relationships and shared practices through which people can confront complexity, work across differences and develop alternatives together? How do educators, students, institutions and communities become co-creators rather than simply providers and recipients of knowledge?
All of Us — the systemic. What must change in the rules, incentives, governance arrangements and measures of success that shape the choices available to individuals and organisations? Who has the power to change those conditions, and who remains excluded from the decisions?
Developing more courageous leaders matters little if the systems they enter consistently punish courageous action. Changing institutional incentives without cultivating responsibility and judgement may simply produce new ways of gaming the system. And neither will be sufficient if we continue to imagine that business education can transform itself independently of business, government and society.
The work requires educators and institutional leaders willing to question familiar practices; employers and investors prepared to examine what they reward; accreditors, rankings bodies and research communities prepared to reconsider what they recognise as excellence; and students, public institutions and communities able to participate meaningfully in defining the purposes and consequences of education.
These actors do not have identical responsibilities or equal power. But lasting transformation cannot be delegated to any one of them.
At GRLI, our efforts through initiatives such as BE the Tipping Point and the Impact Innovation Circles seek to create practical spaces for this kind of inquiry and experimentation, working alongside institutions and networks across the field.
The aim is not to demonstrate that GRLI or any other organisation has solved the problem. It is to help connect people who are already changing practice, develop useful learning together, and enable approaches to travel and be adapted across contexts.
These are contributions to an unfinished transition, not evidence that it is complete.
What are we prepared to change together?
Marquis’s provocation, the calls for reform, the defence of institutional diversity, the attention to evidence, the emphasis on human development and the search for alternative forms of organising are not mutually exclusive positions from which we must select a winner.
Together, they illuminate different dimensions of a problem that no single discipline, institution or network can adequately address.
Perhaps the most important opportunity now is to move beyond parallel conversations towards a more connected process of inquiry, experimentation and learning.
- What have we discovered about the conditions under which institutions genuinely change?
- Which established assumptions must we challenge, and which capabilities and practices should we preserve and strengthen?
- Where are different educational and organisational arrangements already demonstrating possibilities worth learning from?
- What must we stop doing, begin doing or do differently — together?
- And, crucially, who is still missing from this conversation?
Business education helped normalise some of the logics that brought us here. It also has the potential to help tip the field towards more regenerative, just and globally responsible practice.
The more consequential question is not whether business schools deserve to exist. It is what forms of education, leadership and organising are needed for people, societies and the living world to flourish — and whether we are prepared to change the conditions necessary to make them possible.
That question, and the action it demands, belong to all of us.
About the author: E. John North is Executive Director of the Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative (GRLI), an independent foundation working with educators, institutions and partners to advance globally responsible leadership and the transformation of management education. https://grli.org/
A note on the use of AI: This article draws on my reading of the contributions referenced and on GRLI’s longstanding inquiry into globally responsible leadership and management education. I used ChatGPT to help organise the different perspectives and refine the writing. The interpretations and conclusions reflect my own judgement, informed by GRLI’s work.
References and further reading
The original provocation and subsequent discussion
Christopher Marquis (2026). I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down. The New York Times, 18 October. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/18/opinion/business-school-mba-harvard-cornell-cambridge.html
Marc Ethier (2026). The Professor Who Called to Abolish Business Schools Tells P&Q What He’d Build Instead. Poets&Quants, 19 October. https://poetsandquants.com/2026/10/19/exclusive-the-professor-who-called-to-abolish-business-schools-tells-pq-what-hed-build-instead/
Marc Ethier (2026). The Business School World Responds to Chris Marquis — And Not All of It Is Pushback. Poets&Quants, 20 October. https://poetsandquants.com/2026/10/20/the-business-school-world-responds-to-chris-marquis-and-not-all-of-it-is-pushback/
Perspectives on purpose and institutional diversity
Vikas Kumar (2026). Before We Abolish Business Schools, Let’s Look Beyond the West. Poets&Quants, 23 October. https://poetsandquants.com/2026/10/23/before-we-abolish-business-schools-lets-look-beyond-the-west/
Scott Beaulier (2026). Please Don’t Abolish My Business School. The Arena, 19 October. https://arenainstitutions.substack.com/p/please-dont-abolish-my-business-school
Philip Kotler (2026). The Need for Improved Business Schools. LinkedIn, 20 October. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/need-improved-business-schools-philip-kotler-prpsc/
Incentives, institutions and responsibility
Judy Samuelson (2026). Chris Marquis on the End of Business Schools. LinkedIn, 19 October. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/chris-marquis-end-business-schools-judy-samuelson-slfzc/
Shivaram Rajgopal (2026). Business-School Bashing Is an Old Delivery. Substack, 18 October. https://thegoogly.substack.com/p/business-school-bashing-is-an-old
Anat R. Admati (2019). How Business Schools Can Help Restore Trust in Capitalism. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/09/how-business-schools-can-help-restore-trust-in-capitalism
Leadership development, evidence and alternative approaches
Sachin H. Jain (2026). Business Schools Benefit From Teaching Moral Courage. Shutting Them Down Won’t Help. Forbes, 20 October. https://www.forbes.com/sites/sachinjain/2026/10/20/business-schools-need-to-teach-moral-courage-shutting-them-down-wont-help/
Casey Evans (2026). What the Case Against Business Schools Misses. LinkedIn, 20 October. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-case-against-business-schools-misses-casey-evans-3yqve/
Nicolai J. Foss (2026). Abolish the Business School? Not So Fast. Notes from a Strategy Scholar, 19 October. https://nicolaijfoss.substack.com/p/abolish-the-business-school-not-so
Sameer Hasija and Mark Stabile (2026). If Business Schools Didn’t Exist, We Would Have to Invent Them. Poets&Quants, 22 October. https://poetsandquants.com/2026/10/22/commentary-if-business-schools-didnt-exist-we-would-have-to-invent-them/?pq-category=thought-leadership
Daron Acemoglu, Alex He and Daniel le Maire (2022). Eclipse of Rent-Sharing: The Effects of Managers’ Business Education on Wages and the Labor Share in the US and Denmark. NBER Working Paper 29874. https://www.nber.org/papers/w29874
The unfinished transformation of management education
GRLI, WBSCSB and PRME (2012). 50+20: Management Education for the World. https://grli.org/50plus20/
Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative. BE the Tipping Point — Impact Innovation Circles. https://grli.org/tipping-point/
