EXCLUSIVE: MIT Sloan Management Review Board Members Blast ‘Impulsive’ Decision To Shut Down ‘An Institution’

The decision by MIT to shut down the 67-year-old Sloan Management Review continues to draw rebuke from inside the editorial advisory board the school reconstituted less than a year ago that advises it on the journal’s future. In separate interviews with Poets&Quants, two members of the board – Stuart Hart of the University of Michigan and Tensie Whelan of NYU’s Stern School of Business – describe being surprised by the announcement and rejecting the framing offered by Sloan’s leadership.

MIT Sloan Dean Richard Locke informed colleagues earlier this month that the school will cease production of SMR after a nearly seven-decade run, with the final issue slated for September 2026. The closure will cost 23 full-time staffers and roughly 20 contractors their jobs. In his letter, Locke positioned the move as part of a broader effort to build a more unified, strategic, and streamlined approach to messaging and external engagement at Sloan, with new emphasis on newsletters, podcasts, social media, and short-form digital content. The journal, founded in 1959 as the Industrial Management Review, is led by editor in chief Abbie Lundberg, who was named to the role in 2021.

The reaction across business academia and management circles has been swift and sharp. Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath, also a member of the SMR advisory board, wrote in Fast Company that the shutdown represents a strategic inflection point for management thinking, warning that short-form video and social-first content are extraordinary at spreading ideas that have already been simplified but almost useless at developing ideas that are genuinely novel and complex. Dozens of academics and others – authors, deans, and longtime contributors to the magazine – have weighed in on LinkedIn with similar laments.

Among them was another board member, Andrew Winston, a longtime contributor whose quarterly column on sustainable business has run in the magazine for more than a decade. Winston took to LinkedIn and his own Substack to dissect Sloan’s announcement line by line; he notes that the word “communications” appears ten times in the letter from the administration while “business” appears only once, and that the word “strategic” is used only in reference to MIT’s branding. “Reducing a 67-year institution for business ideas to a line item in a brand strategy misses the point,” he writes. Winston goes on to praise SMR for being unusually willing to push the boundaries of business thought leadership, from sustainability work that other outlets long treated as anti-business to a recent piece of his arguing that companies should not be sitting out the fight for democracy and the rule of law. He said MIT’s editors actually pressed him to keep, and in places sharpen, the most direct language. “MIT SMR put thought leadership into the world,” Winston writes. “It helped business leaders build better companies that profit, grow, and serve their employees and the world. That’s a righteous mission, and it did more than improve the MIT brand.” He closes his post: “Bravo to 67 years of helping business be better.”

STUART HART: ‘IT JUST SEEMS LIKE A REALLY BAD DECISION’

Now two more board members are adding their voices to the chorus – and their objections are pointed.

Stuart L. Hart, professor in residence at the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise, a partnership between Michigan Ross and the School for Environment and Sustainability, has long been considered one of the leading academic voices on sustainability and corporate strategy. He is the author of nine books, including Capitalism at the Crossroads, named by Cambridge University as one of the 50 top sustainability books of all time, and most recently Beyond Shareholder Primacy: Remaking Capitalism for a Sustainable Future, published in 2024. He has contributed to MIT Sloan Management Review for the better part of three decades, writing what he estimates to be half a dozen stories.

Like much of the publication’s audience, Hart learned of the shutdown of MIT SMR only after the decision had been made.

“There was no forewarning, which made it, you know, even more shocking,” Hart tells Poets&Quants. “It seemed very sudden. I mean, they just formed this kind of advisory board several months back, and we’d met a couple of times as a group. The last meeting was a couple of months ago. And everything was very positive. It was really sort of talking about what’s the best strategy for SMR going forward, you know, on down the challenges that they’re facing with digital media and so forth. There was no hint.”

The announcement, he says, arrived as a short note from the editor to the board. “I felt badly for her,” Hart says. “I can only assume that this was a rather sudden decision that was made. Not even clear where the decision came from.”

After comparing notes with other advisory board members, Hart said the dominant feeling is bewilderment. “It took everyone not only by surprise, but it took them aback,” he says. “It just seems like an ill-advised decision. I get that there’s competition. I get that there are challenges coming from short-form digital media, YouTube, social media, so forth. But that’s true of every publication.”

And, he argues, the response to those pressures should not be to walk away from the work SMR has been doing. “Maybe I’m old school,” Hart says, “but I still think that there is space for longer-form articles and thought leadership. Especially that kind of work at the intersection of academia and practice, which is where Sloan has always sort of situated itself. There’s HBR (Harvard Business Review), there’s Sloan, there’s California Management Review, there’s Stanford Social Innovation Review. There aren’t a lot of others that are in that space. And now this really sort of removes what really was, in my view, an institution. It seems like an impulsive decision to take down an institution.”

Hart is especially critical of the way the decision has been described publicly. “The way that it’s being communicated strikes me as pretty narrow,” he says. “It’s hard for me to imagine that it would come from the dean’s office at the Sloan School. That’s where you would expect that it would come from. But it’s hard to imagine that the dean’s office wouldn’t understand the broader context of Sloan Management Review.”

The notion that SMR functioned as the business school’s house organ, he said, is simply wrong. “The idea that Sloan Management Review is somehow just a voice for the business school is absurd. It’s patently absurd. It’s not that. It’s never been that. Do Sloan faculty publish in the journal? Yeah, sure they do. Just like Harvard faculty publish in Harvard Business Review. But it’s certainly not an exclusive voice of Harvard Business School. They’re not captive outlets, and they never have been, and it would reduce their credibility if they were.”

Hart notes that the composition of the SMR board, populated with scholars from across business academia, including faculty whose home institutions are direct competitors of MIT, is itself evidence of the journal’s independence. Harvard Business School professors, he points out, have published in Sloan over the years, and vice versa.

TENSIE WHELAN: ‘WHEN WE LOSE VOICES LIKE MIT SMR, WE LOSE A VOICE’

Tensie Whelan, distinguished professor of the practice for business and society and founding director of the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business, has spent more than two decades at the intersection of business strategy and sustainability, joining Stern after a long run as president of the Rainforest Alliance. Her published work spans from her 1991 Island Press book Nature Tourism: Managing for the Environment to the widely cited Practitioners’ Guide to Embedding Sustainability, co-authored with Chisara Ehiemere at the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business. She has also been a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review on ESG reporting and corporate sustainability.

Reached for comment by email, Whelan says her first response to the shutdown was sadness, both for SMR itself and for what its closure signals about the wider state of business publishing.

“I was saddened, both for the loss of MIT Sloan Management Review and for the broader challenges confronting journalism and publications,” Whelan says. “When we lose voices like MIT SMR, we lose a voice that provides us with new insights and perspectives.”

She says she, too, was struck by how the move was framed. Asked about the disconnect between Sloan’s positioning of the closure as a communications strategy decision and SMR‘s long-standing insistence that it operated independently of the school’s communications function, Whelan is careful but unmistakable in her wording. “Not being privy to these internal calculations, all I can say is that I found it surprising,” she says.

Whelan sees the closure as part of a much broader pattern playing out across legacy publications. “I see this as a broader commentary,” she says. “Storied publications are being forced to extend their brand into events, conventions, advertising and editorial supplements, all to be able to compete with free content and reduced attention spans.”

Even so, she argues, the underlying need that SMR has met for nearly seven decades has not gone away. “Making the translation from academic research to insights and tools that the business community can assess and assimilate is critical to bridging the gap between the ivory tower and the narrowly focused practitioner,” Whelan says.

Asked what she considers SMR‘s lasting contribution, Whelan is clear: “Every time a practitioner read MIT SMR and took a kernel of an idea and applied it to her work, the mission of MIT SMR was fulfilled,” she says. “And that happened many, many times over the years, leading to real impact in the field of business management.”

WHAT COMES NEXT

Locke, who became dean of the Sloan School in July 2025, has yet to grant an interview on the decision; his office has cited commencement obligations in declining requests in recent days. That has left much of the public defense of the move to the school’s letter and statement, and much of the public criticism to faculty, alumni, and board members like McGrath, Winston, Hart, and Whelan.

Hart, for his part, says he is not yet ready to treat the closure as final. “A bunch of us have talked about this,” he says. “That’s something that has been a topic of discussion. Maybe if there is sufficient pushback, that might be something they would consider. Because it just seems like a really bad decision.”

For now, MIT Sloan Management Review is on track to publish its final issue in September. 

DON’T MISS: DECISION TO SHUT DOWN 67-YEAR-OLD MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW DRAWS FIERCE BACKLASH and MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW TO SHUT DOWN AFTER 67 YEARS

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