Don’t Abolish Business Schools. Radicalize Them

Calls to abolish business schools are nothing new. They began almost as soon as business schools entered the university, fueled by the conviction that mundane matters of management did not belong in the hallowed halls of higher learning.

Back in 1918, economist Thorstein Veblen forcefully argued that “the work of a College of Commerce […] is a particularly futile line of endeavour.” For Veblen, the vocational pursuit of private gain was fundamentally at odds with the university’s intellectual and public purpose.

In an essay published in the New York Times this month, Cambridge business school professor Chris Marquis knowingly rehearsed the same broad thesis for a 21st-century audience. He argued that business schools corrupt their students, stripping them of their noble and altruistic goals. For Marquis, an MBA is nothing less than an indoctrination into a life of selfish profit maximization with scant interest in doing good for the world.

The argument is seductive and familiar but lacks the radicalism that its rhetoric suggests. Getting to grips with what is really as stake means acknowledging that the problem is fundamentally political, not just about pedagogy or curriculum.

SCAPEGOATS IN A CULTURE WAR 

Today, business schools are not under attack for producing capitalist profiteers. Quite the opposite, they are being scapegoated by right-wing populists for even the mildest softening of their capitalist identities.

The United States leads the way. Look at what happened to Columbia University. In 2023, its business school embraced a mission of “educating and developing leaders and builders of enterprises who create value for their stakeholders and society at large.”

By 2025, the university yielded to the Trump administration’s political pressure signing an agreement to cease “all initiatives designed to “achieve race based outcomes, quotas, diversity targets or similar efforts.” Federal funding was at stake.

Universities and their business schools are in the front line of a high-stakes culture war. The Trump 2.0 era has seen Harvard threatened with funding cuts and orders to screen out international students “hostile to American values and institutions.” Brown, Northwestern, Cornell and others have all been targeted, in part, for their support of diversity, equity and inclusion.

THE POPULIST PLAYBOOK GOES GLOBAL 

What is happening the U.S. today has global precedents. President Jair Bolsonaro’s government savagely cut public funding of universities in Brazil. He said he wanted to “combat the Marxist rubbish that has spread in educational institutions.” In 2021, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğa used powers acquired under a state of emergency to take control of the prestigious Boğaziçi University. He was fighting “communists, terrorists, and traitors.” Similar pressures are evident from India, to Australia, to Britain.

JD Vance, now U.S. vice president, summed it up in a 2021 speech, declaring that “the professors are the enemy.” He would later praise Viktor Orbán’s assault on the supposed “left-wing domination” of Hungarian universities as a model for conservatives to follow.

This is the political context the abolitionist argument ignores. At precisely the moment universities are fighting to preserve their independence and democratic purpose, proposing to dismantle part of them may sound radical, but it does the populists’ work for them.

Radicalizing business education means asking, fundamentally, who and what it is for. Marquis reaches a sweeping conclusion, but he directs his argument only at MBA programs in elite universities. Given the more than 10,000 business schools in the world, there is myopic omission when reform is directed only at a high privileged minority.

DEMOCRATIZE, DON’T ABOLISH 

At Oxbridge and in the Ivy League, you may well find students destined for top drawer consulting jobs or the C-suite. Fair enough, but the majority of business school graduates will become accountants, HR managers, middle managers and the like. For many, especially first-in-family university students, a business degree is a route to economic security and social mobility, not a golden passport into the corporate elite.

There is something rather “let them eat cake” about standing at the top of the educational hierarchy and declaring that institutions many students use to improve their lives should simply be abolished, just as those institutions are under threat from a new global breed of strongman populists. Business schools need to be democratized, not abolished.

Democratizing them means creating opportunities for students while educating them as citizens. It means teaching them how to manage organizations but also to question how power operates within them and whose interests they serve.

The genuinely radical project is not to close business schools, but to remake them as part of the democratic reconstruction of the university itself.

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Carl Rhodes is professor of business and society and former dean at the UTS Business School at the University of Technology Sydney. Alison Pullen is professor of feminism and organization at Macquarie Business School, Sydney. Their book, The Good Business School: The Political Imperative of Management Education in the 21st Century, will be published by Bristol University Press in November.

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