Who Should Get A Vote In What Business Schools Teach?

At a faculty program committee meeting I was leading as Vice Dean of MBA Programs at Berkeley Haas, I introduced an agenda item on curricular relevance. Solene Delacourt, a 2024 Poets&Quants Best 40 Under 40 Professor and Cheit Award recipient for school-wide excellence in teaching, suggested that staff connect faculty with standout alumni from past classes so faculty could hear how their industries are changing. It was a great idea, but it wasn’t likely to lead to change. Without a structured path from insight to action, even excellent feedback rarely changes what gets taught.

Schools across the field are working hard to meet the moment, retooling courses, launching programs, embedding AI in the core. And yet relevance remains hard to achieve. The reason sits in a governance design we take for granted: faculty alone most often hold the right to decide what we teach.

A study led by Greg Shoenfeld and released this month by the Graduate Business Curriculum Roundtable surveys 69 graduate programs on what it calls curricular agility. The study wisely moves beyond standard hurdles like tight budgets to highlight a critical barrier: faculty incentives and workloads rarely align with the effort required to update curricula. It frames the true test of a school as its capacity to take market feedback, make firm decisions, and coordinate the follow-through. This is a vital framework, but to fully support the work it outlines, a deeper layer must be addressed. The report treats existing approval pathways as given, which leaves a foundational condition unexplored: identifying exactly who should hold the decision rights within those structures.

A TWO-SIDED MARKET

Faculty hold curricular decision rights for good reason. They stand closest to the frontier of their fields. They carry the knowledge a curriculum exists to transmit. They teach the same material across many cycles, refining it as they go. Their role reaches beyond knowledge transmission. The relationships fostered in their classrooms become the foundation of the community and the network a strong program affords. Faculty authority in curriculum design matters.

Other parties hold legitimate claims on the same content. A business school serves a two-sided market. Students invest tuition to become strong candidates for careers. Employers pay in their own currency, by hiring the graduates those programs produce. We teach our students that a business begins by understanding its customers and organizing to serve them. We apply this lesson to our own business unevenly.

Faculty will note, fairly, that students and employers already vote with tuition and with job offers. Those votes are real and they are noisy. Reputation, location, and price drive much of where a student enrolls and whom an employer hires, which makes the signal a clumsy guide to curriculum. The single decision employers truly control – whether to hire our graduates – arrives late and offers little signal on what worked in the curriculum and what did not.

Some faculty will bristle at this commercial framing, and the worry is legitimate. A program that over-indexes on student preference drifts toward pandering and away from its mission. The remedy is balance across stakeholders.

RELEVANCE NEEDS STRUCTURE

We pay far less attention to industry than to students. Our research often lags practice. Expertise that feels solid in a seminar can feel exposed in a room of practitioners. Exposure invites retreat, and retreat widens the gap between what we teach and what the field needs. Staying close to industry costs time and comfort, and that is why it needs structure to hold it in place.

Eric Ries makes a parallel argument for companies in Incorruptible. Mission drift is structural rather than ethical. Success creates a gravity that pulls organizations away from what they set out to do, and the fix is governance designed to hold purpose in place. Business schools face a different gravity, one that pulls toward inside expertise and away from the outside knowledge a program needs to stay relevant. Relevance has to be designed into governance.

In other corners of higher education, curricular authority is being concentrated in presidents and governing boards that hear the outside world no more directly than the faculty whose authority they curtail. This move seals the decision away from the people who hold critical information.

Some schools close the relevance gap without reallocation of decision rights, and when they do, a single person usually carries the weight: a rare faculty member turned administrator with deep credibility, an ear for outside voices, and operational command. But their scarcity and the fragility of their achievements upon succession expose the weakness of the unicorn administrator as an organizing model.

A STANDING CURRICULUM BOARD

AACSB accreditation standards have broadened curricular decision rights. The 2020 framework expects schools to maintain curriculum governance that engages internal and external stakeholders in regular review of content and learning outcomes. This shift comes from the recognition that responsibilities once held by faculty alone are now distributed across faculty, staff, and external collaborators in many program models. Faculty involvement in assurance of learning remains required. The room for broader governance design is already open. Specialist programs in fields like Master of Financial Engineering and Real Estate Management already operate this way, with employer input shaping curriculum design, and they are among the most placement-aligned graduate programs in business education. What is missing is governance imagination, particularly applied to generalist business programs.

In my experience as a faculty member and program dean across schools that range from prestigious private and public to broad-access public and niche private, I have seen the need for a standing body, a Program Curriculum Board, with decision rights over program design. Its charge is curricular excellence on two dimensions: rigor and relevance. Its remit covers review, design, and approval. It can initiate as well as respond. The board holds explicit decision authority over program creation and revision. Members include the faculty director who leads the discussion, faculty representatives endorsed by the faculty council, a student representative elected by the student body, an employer representative drawn from alumni active in hiring and chosen through the alumni board, and a staff lead, typically the program dean, who partners with the faculty director, facilitates the work and brings execution considerations into the room. Faculty voting weight remains significant and reflects their expertise and accountability. Specific proportions and approval thresholds are design choices each school can fit to its mission.

The board tracks a set of metrics that translate its charge into evidence. Rigor is measured through assurance of learning. Relevance is monitored through market uptake of graduates and recent alumni feedback. Market success is tracked through enrollment health, graduation rates, and student experience indicators including net promoter score. Movement below thresholds on any of these metrics triggers a review and, where evidence warrants, a redesign. A staff member maintains the dashboard, initiates triggered reviews, and supports each member in representing their constituency. Information flows in from many sources. Authority sits in the room.

The board’s standards are provisional by design. This draws on Charles Sabel’s work on experimentalist governance, where institutional rules function as working positions that get revised as evidence and field conditions shift. Integration with existing governance, including the faculty council, academic senate, and the dean’s office, is a design choice each school will fit to its structure. What stays constant is the board’s authority over program-level curricular decisions.

WHAT FACULTY KEEP & GAIN

Faculty may reject this idea outright as an infringement on their rights or loss of power. I’d suggest that framing discounts what is retained and gained by the proposal. Faculty retain disciplinary integrity, content standards, the right to teach what their evidence supports, control over how their own courses run, and influence over program curriculum through a representative. And they gain decision integrity and programs aligned with purpose, insulated from idiosyncratic forces, for example, favoritism steering resources to a powerful faculty member’s pet program, or a single loud voice exploiting consensus norms to block a proposal. The board structure provides clarity on the terms for initiating a program revision: metrics drop below thresholds, the board convenes, evidence comes into the room, and a decision follows. What results are programs grounded in evidence, vetted against mission, and built to serve their purpose.

Under this design, four recurring flashpoints in curricular debate become well-considered governance decisions. The balance between theoretical foundations and applied skills, with AI literacy as the current case, gets settled with employer and recent alumni evidence in the room rather than left to disciplinary tradition. An experiential learning requirement becomes a question the board can answer on a timeline. Flexibility in delivery modality moves from a workload negotiation to a deliberate program design choice, weighed against student outcomes and employer needs. The integration of AI into pedagogy, distinct from AI literacy as content, becomes a program design decision rather than a course-by-course experiment.

Andrew Hoffman has set the destination for what business schools could become and whom they should serve. Governance is the road. What we teach, whom we serve, and how well we execute all turn on who decides, and that question has been answered the same way for a century. The schools leading the next chapter of business education will be the ones willing to answer it differently.

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Wendy Guild is former Vice Dean of MBA Programs at Berkeley Haas and the co-founder of ImpactMetrics, a consultancy focused on enhancing educational institutions’ effectiveness. 

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