The Business School World Responds To Chris Marquis – And Not All Of It Is Pushback

CASEY EVANS: ‘SKEPTICISM IS A BUSINESS SKILL’

Casey Evans, interim dean of American University’s Kogod School of Business, brings an unusual résumé to the debate. Before joining academia, she was a forensic accountant on the team that investigated Bernard Madoff. In a LinkedIn post published Tuesday (October 20), Evans agrees that a case written with a company’s approval is a weak substitute for evidence and that “win-win” stories can hide real tradeoffs. But she rejects the essay’s conclusion that B-schools can’t teach disciplined skepticism.

“Skepticism is a business skill,” she writes. Madoff’s fraud held up for years, she notes, because people admired his story instead of testing it, just as Harvard praised Enron in cases before its collapse. “Financial statements are not simply tools for increasing profits; they are also evidence. Teaching students to examine them is not the same as teaching them to accept management’s perspective. It can equip them to challenge it.”

Evans also turns Marquis’ example against him. The clean-sheet program he praises, Stuart Hart’s sustainability degree at the University of Vermont, “is an MBA, housed in UVM’s business school,” she writes. Kogod has taken a similar path, integrating sustainability across all required MBA core credits rather than confining it to an elective or, as with Marquis’ course at Cambridge, to the end of the program. “Parts of the essay’s proposed alternative look less like a reason to close business schools and more like a description of work already underway within them,” she writes.

She argues that Marquis leaves too little room for graduates who serve the public, pointing to Kogod alumnus David Nason, who served at the Securities and Exchange Commission and as assistant secretary for financial institutions at the U.S. Treasury. And she takes the Acemoglu research on business-educated managers seriously.

“A student who can calculate a return but cannot question the assumptions behind it is not adequately prepared,” Evans writes. “Neither is a student who can recommend a strategy without considering who bears its risks. Those are reasons to demand better business education, not to abandon it.”

TODD CORT: TEACH BUSINESS TO ETHICAL STUDENTS

Todd Cort, senior lecturer in sustainability at the Yale School of Management, agrees with Marquis’ diagnosis but offers a different cure. “I disagree with his remedy, not because it goes too far, but because it overlooks a model that already exists and works: the joint degree,” Cort writes in a Substack essay titled Teaching Ethics to Business Students is not Sufficient. We must Teach Business to Ethical Students published Monday (October 19).

Cort argues that the MBA’s quantitative core optimizes a single variable, financial return, and that “students absorb not just the method but the premise.” Electives and sustainability centers haven’t changed that, he writes, because “values that live in electives are values that can be cut.”

His alternative is to scale joint degrees pairing the MBA with environmental management, public health, law or policy, so students arrive in finance with a professional identity anchored in the health of a system. Cort acknowledges his bias, since Yale runs one of the oldest such programs, and that joint degrees take longer and cost more. As for the criticism that they attract students who already care, he argues that’s the point. “The first job of a better model is to stop converting them back.”

JUDY SAMUELSON: START WITH THE FINANCE CLASSROOM

Judy Samuelson, founder and executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program, writes in a LinkedIn post published Monday (October 19), titled Chris Marquis on the end of business schools, that she “loved” the essay. But she asks a more practical question: “Since B-schools won’t disappear in my lifetime, where DO we turn to revamp the system we have created?”

Her answer is the finance classroom. Aspen once interviewed 50 finance faculty who were thinking differently, and Samuelson writes that change would require a generational investment in new scholars, journals and teaching about corporate purpose. She names Stanford’s Anat Admati, Michigan’s Jerry Davis and Chris White, and Cort among the many scholars ready to help.

Marquis, she writes, “understands it’s harder to build a new curriculum when it requires replacing one that commands so much attention and so-called ‘value creation.’ We need a do-over.” And she ends with a question for the schools:

“If students demand more from their education, can these schools evolve at the pace of the changes we are living through?”

ON LINKEDIN, 450-PLUS COMMENTS – AND SOME SURPRISING SUPPORT

The debate is just as lively on LinkedIn, where Marquis’ post about the essay had drawn more than 450 comments as of Tuesday (October 20) afternoon, many of which he has answered himself.

Some of the strongest support comes from inside the institutions he criticizes. Harvard Business School’s Michael Tushman calls it an “excellent and super important piece.” Wren Montgomery, who teaches a required sustainability course at Queen’s University Smith School of Business, writes: “I always say I feel like I am rescuing them from a cult and giving them permission to be themselves again.” Marquis’ Cambridge colleague Jaideep Prabhu agrees with “pretty much everything,” but adds: “I still hope we can somehow manage to improve these institutions with effort!”

Some are already putting the essay to use. Bobbi Thomason, a professor at Pepperdine Graziadio Business School, says she has restructured her MBA leadership class around individual agency, adding that she planned to bring the essay to class on Tuesday. Bidjan Nashat describes a change he and Judge professor Jochen Menges made a decade ago, turning MBA orientation week at WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management into a fundraising challenge for Save the Children Deutschland that has since raised close to $1 million. “A school signals what success means long before the recruiters do,” he writes, “and it can choose to send a different signal on day one.”

IESE Business School’s Fabrizio Ferraro agrees with much of Marquis’ diagnosis but argues that critics are needed inside business schools. “I know exit always feels as morally attractive, but ultimately I think we should stay and raise our voice,” he writes.

Baylor University’s Peter Klein, who has written with Foss, offers the sharpest pushback. Managers are stewards of resources owned by others, he argues, and “producing skilled managers in the traditional sense may be the greater good.” Brian Boland, co-founder of Delta Fund, responds that maximizing value for owners is a moral position too, one business schools teach “as if it were physics.” The question worth teaching, he writes, is who the owners are.

ON REDDIT: ‘IT’S TOUGH TO FEEL A WAVE OF ALTRUISM’

The essay has also sparked several threads on Reddit’s r/MBA, the largest of which has drawn more than 100 comments. One user, MBA-Crystal-Ball, an alum of one of the schools where Marquis has taught, calls abolition “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” and argues that the essay underplays the role of tuition – an issue Marquis acknowledged to P&Q.

“It’s tough to feel a wave of altruism while staring at $200K in debt,” the user writes. “The instinct is to pick the highest-paying job and get out of the quicksand before it engulfs you.”

Echoing Beaulier, the top-voted comment in another thread, titled It is time to shut MBA schools, sees class bias in Marquis’ call to send future managers through the humanities. “This is just a throw back to old, old school upper crust culture,” user tumidfuture writes. “Business school is vocational, yes, it’s also a place for self selected middle class and poor people to get somewhere better.”

In the same thread, user SwellGuyScott argues that abolition wouldn’t last. Struggling companies would want to learn what successful ones do, the user writes, and some prestigious school would soon offer to train that talent by bringing in business leaders to teach students. “So you just end up looping back around to the concept of business schools, albeit under some new obnoxious moniker like ‘People Leader Schools.’”

Others take a more charitable view. User Winter-Building-3445, who studied at Cornell, compares Marquis to NYU Stern’s Scott Galloway, “using hot takes to get people’s attention” – with a difference. “Unlike Galloway, as a professor he has the research chops to back up his conclusions,” the user writes.

Marquis, for his part, says the redesign he wants can’t be left to one critic. When P&Q asked what he would do if a university president asked for help starting over, he said it would require changing both the curriculum and faculty incentives, and that “it needs to be some process that involves the faculty.” Judging by the past few days, plenty of faculty, students, and alumni are ready to join the conversation.

DON’T MISS THE PROFESSOR WHO CALLED TO ABOLISH BUSINESS SCHOOLS TELLS P&Q WHAT HE’D BUILD INSTEAD

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