I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down.
I keep thinking about the phrase "flawed expertise." It's the most damning thing you can say about a school, because it means the students leave with a polished framework that quietly edits out everything that doesn't fit. That's a harder problem to fix than simple ignorance.
The noble intentions part is what makes it weird. Most business school students aren't cynical. They want to do good, build things, lead well. Then they spend two years learning frameworks that reduce every human decision to a spreadsheet row. The curriculum itself becomes a kind of reality distortion field.
I'd want to know which parts of the training do the damage. Is it the case studies that reward short-term thinking? The networking that teaches students to see people as resources? Or something as simple as the vocabulary, where words like "synergy" and "leverage" quietly reshape how they hear the world?
I don't think shutting them down is the answer, but I understand why a professor inside the machine would say it. When you watch bright, earnest people walk out with a narrower view of the world than they walked in with, you start to wonder if the whole institution is converting wonder into certainty.