THE WORLD OF BUSINESS

20 October 2026

I was fascinated to read an opinion piece by Chris Marquis in the New York Times called I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/18/opinion/business-school-mba-harvard-cornell-cambridge.html?unlocked_article_code=1.KFE.6j_-.CxCpHNcCZCny&smid=url-share

As someone with a Masters of Business Administration and, to be somewhat boastful, a “gold” medal for being the best MBA graduate of my year, you might think I’d disagree with him but I don’t. He’s reached the conclusion that “business schools don’t just reflect our economic system – they actively manufacture its priorities and normalize its harms, training the future leaders who will design and defend the structure driving our overlapping global crises.” And to add insult to injury, these very schools have impacted on the universities that house them where it’s now difficult to defend the existence or philosophy or history courses in any other terms than student enrolment numbers and revenue generated. In his opinion this means - and I agree with him:

“The university’s capacity to cultivate historical memory, moral judgment and democratic imagination is weakened, even as its capacity to churn out data analysts, financial engineers and “innovation” managers grows. The irony — and danger — is that in the age of A.I., the thinking fostered in the arts and humanities is increasingly urgent. The domination of business schools is not only physical and financial; it is intellectual, and it is crowding out liberal education.”

Although there might be discussions about social accountability or ethics or sustainability in an MBA, when the point of a business school is to teach students how to generate profits for stakeholders they are usually optional units of study and certainly not at the heart of the teaching model.

Marquis suggests as an alternative having “schools of organising” rather than “schools for business”, where students study how humans work together for shared ends. That’s where my MBA sits outside of the mainstream. At what was then the South Australian Institute of Technology you could do a straightforward business MBA but you could also do one that focussed on Arts Administration, Health Administration or Public Administration. There were shared courses in practical areas such as accounting and finance and marketing but at the heart of the other versions were the values and culture of the specific industries under consideration.

At each point when I’ve seen artists and arts leaders connect with people studying business, I’ve seen changes – and mainly from those outside of our world. For example, when a group of blokes from engineering and IT world who were studying leadership came to spend a day with my management team at MTC, they were shocked. They’d been led to believe that management was about competition, about getting on top, about obtaining knowledge to keep power and instead they saw a group of diverse people, working cooperatively together, sharing information, supporting each other and making decisions for the benefit of all rather than themselves.

If that’s what our business schools taught, maybe the world would be a better place.

1986 MBA Graduation Day with my Arts Administration students