Exclusive: The Professor Who Called To Abolish Business Schools Tells P&Q What He’d Build Instead

Christopher Marquis expected a few business school insiders to read his essay. Instead, he got hundreds of messages – from deans, current MBA students, would-be applicants who never enrolled, and strangers who say he put into words something they had felt for years.

“The chord that this essay struck, I never would have guessed,” says Marquis, the Cambridge Judge Business School professor whose New York Times essay, I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down, is one of the most widely shared pieces on management education in years. “I thought business school insiders would perhaps find it interesting, but the extent to which it has circulated widely, and the people that have contacted me – it’s just totally blown me away.”

Marquis spoke with Poets&Quants on Monday (October 19) from the airport as he prepared to fly back to the U.S. He says the vast majority of messages he has received – from deans, fellow faculty, current and prospective students, and others – have been positive. Many, he adds, focus less on whether he’s right than on what needs to be done.

NOT ABOLITION – REINVENTION

That last question turns out to be the one Marquis most wants to answer. For all the talk of abolition sparked by the essay’s provocative headline – which, he points out, was chosen by a Times editor – Marquis says it isn’t realistic that business schools will ever totally disappear. 

“I work at a business school,” he says. “I think the students are fantastic in most cases. I think there are so many good people at business schools that want to make change.”

He’ll soon be working at another one. Marquis is on sabbatical this term; in January, he returns to Cornell University, where he spent six and a half years before moving to Cambridge, to take up a chaired professorship in international business.

Rather than abolition, his prescriptions point toward redesign: a new curriculum, new faculty incentives, and programs built from scratch around the problems business leaders will face. 

He also has more to say. The roughly 3,000-word essay is only part of what he wrote, and he has another 4,500 words that didn’t make the final version, including a section on MBA recruiting, a topic he says audiences keep raising, including at a recent talk he gave at the University of Amsterdam.

The ideas behind the essay go back to Marquis’ decade at Harvard Business School, where he wrote dozens of case studies. He describes the HBS case operation as “a huge economic engine,” and says even the school’s workshops for international scholars, which many participants see as generous, serve a commercial purpose: getting those scholars to teach with HBS cases.

“They might not understand that there is an economic rationale behind it,” he says.

What brought those ideas to the surface, he says, was politics. Since Donald Trump’s second election in 2024, Marquis has written extensively about billionaire wealth and inequality, driven by what he calls “violations of the American social contract, violations of rule of law, corruption, inequality.” As he wrote, he says, he kept returning to advice he had heard for years from people who knew his research on the systemic barriers to sustainable business: look at the business schools themselves.

’14 WEEKS’

One of the essay’s most striking claims is that students often abandon their altruistic ambitions within a single semester. Marquis says he has watched it happen.

When he taught first-term students at HBS, one early exercise involved them writing down their goals for the MBA. “You could see what they wanted to do,” he says. “Really inspiring stuff. Fast forward 14 weeks into the term: totally abandoned.”

He agrees that six-figure tuition debt plays a role.

“These institutions cost way too much money, in my opinion,” Marquis says. “It’s a huge burden.” But he believes the culture of business school is just as powerful. “There’s a huge sort of FOMO,” he says. “There are all these recruiting events, their friends are doing this and that, they learn about all these amazing benefits that come with working at McKinsey or wherever. It literally (happens) in 14 weeks.”

He says the pattern isn’t unique to Harvard, and he doesn’t want to single out any individual schools. “I saw the same thing at Cambridge, too.”

WHAT A CLEAN SHEET LOOKS LIKE

When Marquis looks for a model of what could replace the traditional MBA, he points to Stuart Hart, who co-founded the Sustainable Innovation MBA at the University of Vermont’s Grossman School of Business with then-dean Sanjay Sharma. The connection is personal. Marquis later held the Cornell chair that had been established for Hart. “I can’t say that I replaced him, because he’s a hard person to replace,” Marquis says.

What appeals to him about Vermont is the decision to start over rather than add on. The program built sustainability and social impact into every course, including finance and accounting, and placed students with mission-driven companies.

“It infuses the entire curriculum,” Marquis says. He compares it to specialized health care MBAs, except that Hart’s program puts responsible, sustainable business “really at the core of all classes.”

FIX THE INCENTIVES

In his essay, Marquis argues that faculty are rewarded for selling big ideas rather than producing knowledge. Asked what he would change about how business schools hire and promote professors, he points to something he has come to admire during his time in Britain: the Research Excellence Framework, or REF, the national assessment that ties university funding partly to the real-world impact of faculty research.

“The one thing about the UK that I’ve been really surprised and impressed with is the fact that there is a tremendous amount of focus on impact,” he says. Schools must document examples of faculty impact and provide evidence of it, and that affects the funding they receive. At Judge, he says, the effect of new hires on the school’s REF performance comes up in hiring discussions.

Marquis says no single U.S. school can make that change by itself. 

“If one place changes its hiring and promotion criteria, then people won’t want to work there,” he says. U.S. tenure systems remain built mainly on academic publishing, with some weight on teaching, and he doesn’t think accreditors are up to the task. 

“I don’t think the AACSB or something like that is strong enough,” he says. “If your funding is contingent on how you show in the REF, that directs attention pretty quickly.”

A WORD FOR APPLICANTS

So what should a prospective student do if they want to fix health care or commercialize clean energy, and worry they’ll end up at Goldman Sachs instead? “I think it’s sadly possible,” Marquis says. “First of all, I think they should maybe think about whether an MBA is right for them.”

Many of the messages he has received come from health care professionals, he says, some of them relieved they never enrolled and stayed on their original path. Others come from current MBA students who are struggling with the questions the essay raises.

“The level of emotion I’ve gotten in emails is really shocking to me,” Marquis says. After his Amsterdam talk, one attendee told him the piece spoke to their soul. Others have told him he put into words something they had felt but couldn’t name. “It’s been gratifying,” he says, “but also disturbing.”

Marquis estimates that about 90% of the responses have been supportive. A few readers, he says, have dismissed the essay as an ideological rant.

THE SLEDGEHAMMER QUESTION

Asked what he would do first if a university president called and said, “Help me start over,” Marquis takes a moment. “I’m a little tired,” he admits, given the week he’s had. Then he names two priorities.

“The two mechanisms I think are really important: one is incentives, another is the design,” he says. That means reforming the curriculum so that “the subjects that are dealing with the long-term existential crises we face are in the curriculum,” and changing faculty incentives to reward impact, much as the REF does.

He adds that he couldn’t make those decisions alone. “It needs to be some process that involves the faculty.”

For someone who has called for abolishing business schools, Marquis ends on an optimistic note. Climate change and inequality, he says, are exactly the kinds of problems business can help solve. “Business leaders and MBA students can play a huge role, both in being responsible for their activity, but also innovation, creativity,” he says. “I think there’s a lot of solutions from business.”

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