‘Let’s Blow Up The Curriculum’: Michigan Ross’ Andrew Hoffman Is Poets&Quants’ 2025 MBA Professor Of The Year

When Andrew Hoffman takes his MBA students into the woods outside Ann Arbor, it’s not a tech detox. It’s a reorientation.

The retreat, part of his popular Management as a Calling course at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, invites students to step back from the grind of job recruiting, networking events, and case studies to confront a deeper question: What kind of life do I want to live?

“That course wouldn’t exist without outside money,” Hoffman says of the program, which was initially funded by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. “When I first tried to get course credit, I got turned down. They told me, ‘This seems more developmental than academic.’ And I laughed and said, ‘Exactly. And we need more of it.’”

‘THE WHY OF BUSINESS’

It’s this commitment to re-humanizing business education — and his growing national influence on the future of the MBA — that earned Andrew Hoffman Poets&Quants’ 2025 MBA Professor of the Year honor.

A professor of sustainable enterprise at Michigan Ross, Hoffman has long challenged the traditional boundaries of business education. He continues on that path in his latest book, Business School and the Noble Purpose of the Market: Correcting the Systemic Failures of Shareholder Capitalism (April 2025), which lays out both critique and prescription for a new model of business education and capitalism itself. 

In Hoffman’s view, business schools today are still operating with a curriculum built for the 1970s and 1980s—one that centers efficiency, shareholder value, and profit maximization, often at the expense of community and social responsibility. “We must rethink the faulty foundations,” he argues in the book. 

“We only focus on the how of business,” he says in conversation. “Now we need to bring in the why.”

TEACHING MANAGEMENT AS A CALLING

Hoffman’s teaching philosophy starts from a simple premise: business is not just a tool for wealth creation. It’s a vehicle for purpose.

In his Management as a Calling course — first launched as an experimental elective, now expanded through a new grant with Templeton and Notre Dame — students don’t just study leadership. They examine their values, motivations, and personal definition of success.

“We should be helping students develop a functioning philosophy for living a meaningful life,” Hoffman says. “That’s not just for humanities departments. Business schools need to take this seriously because of the impact our students have on society.”

The course has struck a chord with students seeking more than prestige and paychecks. “Let’s hope we don’t drum it out of them,” Hoffman adds. “The job market is tough right now, and I get that. But if we could rank business schools by alumni life satisfaction 15 or 20 years out, we’d get a very different picture of what a great education looks like.”

REWRITING THE ROLE OF THE MARKET

While many professors approach sustainability as a bolt-on topic, Hoffman questions the assumptions baked into the very structure of business education.

“I’ve started to drift from the word ‘sustainability,’” he says. “For years I tried to fit sustainability into the norms of the market. But now I think the norms of the market have to change.”

That’s not a call for anti-capitalist revolution, Hoffman emphasizes. It’s a push to evolve capitalism itself into a 21st-century model that serves more than shareholders.

“I get accused of being a socialist sometimes, and I’m not,” he says. “I’m saying: let’s fix capitalism. Let’s go back to Peter Drucker’s definition — the purpose of the firm is to identify and serve a market. If it makes money doing that, great. But profits are a measure, not the mission.”

Hoffman sees early signs of this shift in frameworks like Paul Polman’s “net positive” business philosophy and a growing discourse around regenerative capitalism. “The question isn’t, ‘How do we fit sustainability into business?’” he says. “It’s: ‘What is the future of the market?’”

A RADICAL VISION FOR THE MBA

Hoffman doesn’t just want new electives. He wants to overhaul the entire MBA structure.

“Let’s blow up the curriculum,” he says, only half-joking. “Move away from the standard two-year, eight-semester, four-course-per-term structure. Connect more with other schools — engineering, public policy. Teach students about lobbying and the role of business in government.”

He also calls for greater curricular flexibility and interstitial learning — “most of the learning happens between classes,” he says — and sees generative AI as an opportunity to reclaim business education’s human core.

“AI will teach skills. But it can’t guide students to form a philosophy of life,” he says. “That’s our job.”

And it’s not just MBA students who need that guidance. Hoffman wants business schools to take responsibility for developing faculty, too.

“We need more full professors to act like elders,” he says. “Stop chasing citation counts and think about the next generation — of students and teachers.”

CHARACTER, NOT JUST CAPITAL

What keeps Hoffman optimistic? His students.

“They’re looking for purpose,” he says. “They want to make a difference. And I want to make sure we don’t beat that out of them.”

He’s especially wary of producing graduates who fall into what anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs” — prestigious roles that offer high pay and low meaning. “If we only teach students to do what makes money, they’ll avoid the hard problems — or be totally unprepared when those problems hit.”

That’s why Hoffman believes the MBA should return to its original professional-school roots: training leaders to serve society, much like medicine and law once did.

And what business school, he asks, can honestly say its alumni share a distinct philosophy of life?

“I think about David Brooks’ idea that character is learned like a craft,” Hoffman says. “It’s developed by being immersed in a moral culture. That’s what we should be building in our classrooms.”

POETS&QUANTS 2025 HONORS

DEAN OF THE YEAR: RICE BUSINESS’ PETER RODRIGUEZ

BUSINESS SCHOOL OF THE YEAR: ESCP BUSINESS SCHOOL

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD FOR MBA ADMISSIONS: DUKE FUQUA’S SHARI HUBERT

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD IN BUSINESS SCHOOL BRANDING: ILLINOIS GIES’ JAN SLATER

MBA PROFESSOR OF THE YEAR: MICHIGAN ROSS’ ANDY HOFFMAN

2025 BEST IN CLASS AWARDS FOR TEACHING QUALITY, CAREER SERVICES & MORE  

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