When Christopher Marquis, a professor at Cambridge Judge Business School, argued in The New York Times that business schools should be abolished, the response was immediate. What struck me was not that people disagreed. It was who disagreed. Chairs, senior professors, and program leaders from Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon, and Copenhagen took to LinkedIn to defend their institutions.
This raises a simple question. If business schools enjoyed secure legitimacy, why would so many of their most established figures feel compelled to respond? A confident institution can afford to ignore its critics. The volume of the defense tells us something the defense itself does not say.
Three kinds of defense
The first is the wounded defense. One Cambridge chair called the op-ed harmful, insulting, and damaging to the legitimacy of business schools. Notice the criterion: not whether the critique is true, but whether it is harmful to say. He also pointed to the curriculum, with its sustainability courses, newer case studies, and committed colleagues. But Marquis’s critique concerns the institution’s objective function, not its syllabus. A school can offer ten courses on sustainability while its rankings, tuition model, and placement statistics all reward one thing: making graduates more valuable to employers. Individual faculty may not teach profit maximization. The institution is still optimized for it.
The second is the absorbing defense. Another post framed the exchange as “the beginning of a serious conversation.” One side was cast as a diagnosis of despair, the other as the constructive fix: study what actually works. This looks neutral, but it does quiet work. It turns the question of whether the institution should exist into a question of how to improve it. The problem stays in-house, to be solved with the institution’s own methods. It is a defense not in form but in function.
The third is the testimonial defense. A Carnegie Mellon professor asked top alumni what their MBA gave them, and reported proudly that none of them said networking. Of course they didn’t. The sample is made of winners. They have every reason to vouch for a degree whose prestige is still attached to their résumés. And networking is precisely the answer one cannot say aloud to one’s former professor. Its absence is not evidence that networking doesn’t matter. It is evidence of what cannot be said. What such testimony reveals is not what the school gave its graduates, but the language it taught them to describe it.
Legitimacy is not self-awarded
These three defenses share one feature: they are all internal support. Colleagues rally around colleagues, and alumni vouch for their alma mater. This may sustain morale, but it cannot do the one thing that matters. Legitimacy is conferred from outside: by students deciding whether to pay, by employers deciding whether to hire, by a public deciding whether to believe. When the outside withdraws, no amount of internal consensus will hold the structure up.
The defenders seem to know this. The Carnegie Mellon post reads less like a reply to Marquis than a message to prospective applicants. It is application season, after all. The audience a defense addresses tells you which verdict it fears.
It also explains the urgency. Business schools have been criticized from the outside for decades, largely without consequence. This time the critique came from inside, from a senior professor at one of the world’s most prestigious schools. An insider’s voice lends credibility to everything outsiders have long been saying. The crack is where the external verdict gets in.
Why this time is different
This is not the first reckoning. Henry Mintzberg published Managers Not MBAs two decades ago. Sumantra Ghoshal warned that bad management theories were destroying good management practice. After 2008, business schools were blamed for training the people who built the crisis. Each time the schools defended themselves and survived, because the pipeline held: consulting, banking, and tech kept hiring their graduates.
This time the critique arrives as the pipeline narrows. The entry-level analytical work that once justified the degree is exactly the kind of work AI now does cheaply: the slide decks, the models, the market sizing. Firms are hiring fewer juniors, and even graduates of elite programs are waiting longer for offers. The critique is not new. What is new is that it presses on something that already hurts.
A club, not a school
One might expect business schools simply to hollow out: to keep operating long after anyone believes in them. But hollowing out presupposes that someone keeps paying. Who will that be? If employers increasingly pay for demonstrable skill rather than credentials, the degree loses its instrumental value. What remains is networking and screening, and the people buying those will be those who are already wealthy, already employed, already positioned. At that point the business school is no longer a meritocratic institution. It has become a club, much like many EMBA programs already are. That may be the only kind of program that survives in the end.
The mass business school will not survive this. What survives will still select, but no longer for ability. It will select for belonging.
The business school will not be saved by its defenders. At best, what survives will do so by quietly ceasing to be what it claims to be: no longer a school of merit, but a club of the already arrived.
