The ‘Researcherization’ Of Faculty Is Distorting Business Schools

Imagine two professors.

One redesigns a core MBA course, writes new cases, experiments with simulations, mentors dozens of students, brings executives into the classroom and spends hours giving feedback. Students remember that professor years after graduation.

The other publishes three papers in highly ranked academic journals.

Who is more likely to gain academic status, promotion and opportunities elsewhere?

In too many business schools, we know the answer.

This is what we call the researcherization of faculty: the gradual transformation of the business-school professor from a teacher-scholar who creates and transmits knowledge into a researcher who also happens to teach.

The distinction matters. Researcherization is not about faculty doing too much research. Nor is it an argument against rigorous academic research. Every serious business school should create knowledge, challenge established ideas and expect faculty to contribute to their disciplines.

The problem begins when research becomes the principal currency of academic identity, legitimacy and advancement, while teaching becomes something closer to an obligation.

RESEARCH IS THE NOBLE WORK. TEACHING IS THE TRENCHES.

Listen to the language of academia.

Faculty have a research agenda, a research identity, and a research reputation. They celebrate publications and grants. A paper in a prestigious journal can transform an academic career and travel with a professor from one institution to another.

Teaching is more likely to be discussed as a teaching load.

The language is revealing.

Research has gradually become the noble part of academic work: the activity associated with intellectual prestige, recognition and status. Teaching is too often perceived as being in the trenches. It means preparing classes, answering student emails, marking assignments, redesigning courses, dealing with struggling teams, mentoring students and delivering the same core course again next semester.

None of this means professors do not care about teaching. Many care enormously. The problem is that institutions frequently send them a contradictory message: we tell faculty that students are our purpose while signalling that research is what really counts.

Over more than two decades as a teacher and business-school leader, I have seen how promotion criteria quietly determine what faculty regard as their most consequential work.

And faculty respond rationally.

WHAT WE MEASURE BECOMES WHAT MATTERS

Researcherization did not happen because academics collectively decided teaching was unimportant. It is the predictable result of institutional systems.

Publications, citations, journal classifications and grants are visible and countable. They can be compared across professors, institutions and countries.

Teaching is messier.

How do you quantify the professor who completely redesigns a course? Or the academic who spends an afternoon helping a student understand why her team is failing? What is the metric for an extraordinary classroom discussion? How do you measure a case that changes the way 60 executives think about a problem, or mentoring that alters someone’s career?

Because these contributions are harder to compare, they frequently carry less weight.

In India, the National Institutional Ranking Framework assigns 30% of its management ranking to Research and Professional Practice, largely through publications and citations. The Financial Times MBA ranking gives research 10% and places greater weight on alumni and career outcomes. Different systems therefore create very different signals about what constitutes institutional performance.

Beyond rankings, journal lists and citation measures provide portable evidence for faculty recruitment and promotion. An AACSB Insights analysis has documented their use in appointments, promotion, tenure and contract renewal. A 2026 Research Policy study found that national rating lists in the UK and Australia can redirect publication towards favoured outlets, sometimes at the expense of journal fit and citations.

The individual academic therefore faces a perfectly rational calculation.

A recognised journal article travels. Another university can see it, classify it and value it.

Great teaching rarely travels as easily.

STUDENTS ARE ASKING FOR SOMETHING ELSE

The tension becomes more important when we listen to what learners actually want.

A recent Financial Times global survey of 1,152 business-school alumni found high overall satisfaction alongside demand for more practical experience, updated digital content and stronger communication and leadership development.

These are not peripheral demands. They go to the heart of what management education is supposed to provide.

Employers do not hire journal articles. They hire graduates.

They experience a business school through the people it sends into their organizations: whether those graduates can analyse an ambiguous problem, communicate an uncomfortable recommendation, manage a team, challenge assumptions, make decisions with incomplete information and exercise judgment.

Research absolutely has a role in developing those capabilities. The issue is whether it makes the journey from publication to classroom.

A piece of research should be capable of renewing a course, generating a case, shaping a simulation, informing an executive discussion or creating a project for students. Knowledge creation and teaching should reinforce one another.

Researcherization separates them.

AI MAKES THIS QUESTION MORE URGENT

For decades, one important source of a professor’s value was access to knowledge.

That world is disappearing quickly.

A student can now ask an AI system to explain discounted cash flow, Porter’s Five Forces, organizational culture or the fundamentals of a go-to-market strategy in seconds. It can produce examples, challenge an argument and adapt an explanation to the learner.

This does not make professors less important.

It potentially makes great professors more important.

If information becomes abundant, the value of the faculty member shifts towards what is harder to automate: designing learning experiences, challenging assumptions, facilitating debate, providing meaningful feedback, connecting theory with reality, mentoring students, and developing judgment.

The classroom therefore needs to become more experiential, not less. Simulations, cases, live projects, debates, role plays and engagement with organizations become increasingly important when information itself is available everywhere.

And that creates an extraordinary paradox.

At precisely the moment technology is increasing the value of great teaching, many business schools still operate faculty systems in which research carries the greatest academic status.

We may be redesigning the classroom for the age of AI without redesigning the incentives of the people who teach in it.

WE NEED TO RESTORE THE TEACHER-SCHOLAR

The answer is not to replace researcherization with its opposite.

Business schools do not need professors who teach brilliantly but stop creating knowledge. Nor should every academic be expected to be simultaneously a world-class researcher, teacher, case writer, mentor, consultant, and public intellectual.

They need to restore the idea of the teacher-scholar.

The teacher-scholar creates knowledge and translates it into learning. Research informs teaching. Teaching raises new research questions. Engagement with organizations exposes academics to new problems. Those problems generate new ideas, which return to the classroom.

That is not a compromise between research and teaching. It is a model in which the two strengthen each other.

Schools such as Darden have long demonstrated that teaching itself can become part of an institution’s academic culture and status. Former senior associate dean James Freeland once described teaching as the school’s “social good.” That phrase is important because culture follows status.

If excellent teaching carries prestige, faculty invest in it.

If publications carry prestige and teaching is described primarily as workload, faculty understand that signal, too.

PROMOTION SHOULD ASK A DIFFERENT QUESTION

Better measures of research impact will not, by themselves, solve researcherization.

Even highly relevant and widely cited research does not automatically renew curricula, improve mentoring, create experiential learning, or strengthen students’ professional capabilities.

Promotion systems therefore need to ask more than: Where did you publish?

They should also ask: What did your research change?

Did it enter the curriculum?

Did it generate a case, simulation or student project?

Did it influence managerial practice, public policy or a social problem?

Did it create meaningful learning opportunities?

Did students engage with it?

Did executives use it?

Publication quality still matters. But publication should begin the impact conversation rather than conclude it.

Evaluation could consider knowledge creation alongside curriculum development, learner development, professional engagement and impact. Academics need not contribute equally in every category, but teaching cannot become a lower-status track. Every faculty member in a business school should carry some educational responsibility.

WHAT DO WE WANT A PROFESSOR TO BE?

Ultimately, researcherization forces business schools to confront a surprisingly basic question.

What do we want a business-school professor to be?

If the answer is primarily a researcher who must fulfil a certain number of teaching hours, our current systems may be working exactly as designed.

But if the answer is a teacher-scholar who creates knowledge, brings it into the classroom, challenges students, engages with practice and helps people become better managers and leaders, then our systems of status and reward need to reflect that purpose.

AI is forcing business schools to rethink what students should learn, how they should learn it and what happens inside the classroom.

Perhaps it should also force us to rethink what we value in the people standing at the front of it.

Because when research becomes the noble work and teaching becomes the trenches, students inevitably move towards the margins.

A great business school should be judged by the knowledge it creates, certainly. But also by what that knowledge enables its learners to understand, do and become.

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Benjamin Stévenin is the former Director of Business School Solutions and Partnerships at Times Higher Education. Atish Chattopadhyay is the Director of IMT Ghaziabad. 

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