Professors Warn Abolition Could Hand Training to Firms

Seven business-school academics argue that closing business schools could shift management education into company-run academies and employer-designed credentials, putting training directly in corporate hands. Their argument answers a call to abolish the schools over what they teach about workers, communities and profit.

In a New York Times opinion essay, Christopher Marquis, a professor who has taught at Harvard, Cornell and Cambridge business schools, argued that business schools train students to optimize financial metrics while neglecting workers and communities. He said idealistic students who want to improve health care or commercialize clean energy can end up as consultants and finance professionals. His conclusion: "We don't need to 'fix' business schools. We need to abolish them."

Who Gets to Teach Business

The National Review essay, "The False Dichotomy of Abolishing Business Schools," was published Oct. 30, 2026. Its authors say abolition would end debate over the role of business rather than address shortcomings in business education. They identify themselves as professors in business-related fields who have studied corporate social responsibility, stakeholder governance and the institutional context of markets.

The authors argue that universities should host disagreements about the purpose of firms, the legitimacy of profit and the proper reach of markets. They say students should examine when profit-seeking creates or destroys value, when stakeholder claims should constrain shareholders, and when those claims might shield unaccountable managers. They also argue that students should make the strongest case for multiple answers, including positions they consider wrong.

Their proposed curriculum puts rival accounts side by side. The authors say business schools should assign Milton Friedman's 1970 New York Times argument that a business's social responsibility is to increase its profits, alongside stakeholder theory, which they identify as the critics' preferred alternative and attribute to business-school professor R. Edward Freeman.

The Corporate Alternative

The authors say most business graduates don't become investment bankers. They manage hospital supply chains, keep family firms solvent, run nonprofits and start small businesses, they write. Business accounts for about one in five American bachelor's degrees, according to the essay.

If universities closed business schools, the authors contend, management education would move to company-run academies and employer-designed credentials. McDonald's has operated its training facility, "Hamburger University," since 1961. The authors contrast that corporate setting with university classrooms where students can study alongside economists, historians and critics such as Marquis.

They also argue that commercializing clean energy, vaccines, batteries and drought-resistant crops takes people who can protect intellectual property, find customers, finance enterprises, comply with regulation and manage startups. The essay cites the National Science Foundation's I-Corps, an entrepreneurship curriculum based on customer discovery. Since 2012, more than half of its 3,200-plus teams—nearly 1,700—have launched startups and raised $7 billion. U.S. academic institutions formed more than 900 startups in 2024, the authors say.

A Reform Inside the Institution

The authors acknowledge that rankings can distort priorities, curricula can become narrow, and career offices can steer students toward a small number of employers. They propose more viewpoint diversity, history and institutional economics, entrepreneurship exposure, and attention to managers' accountability as remedies. They write: "The fix is more pluralism, not less. We should open doors, not close them."

The essay says Marquis teaches an essentials of business course at his institution. Its authors argue that his abolition call divides colleagues into the enlightened and everyone else, while portraying people who see markets as engines of opportunity as naïve, ignorant, illiberal or servants of corporate power.

Per Bylund, Enrique Escalante, Nicolai Foss, Peter Klein, Samuele Murtinu, Donald Siegel and Siri Terjesen conclude that a business-school professor can publish a call to abolish business schools in the New York Times and keep a job. They call that freedom "the pluralism worth defending." Their final appeal is: "At their best, business schools are where society argues with itself about business. Keep the argument. Keep the schools."