From External Rating to Internal Reflection

• Public sustainability ratings from nongovernmental organizations are becoming influential signals, creating pressure on business schools to demonstrate rapid curricular change.
• If schools respond too quickly, they are more likely to make only fragmented or symbolic adjustments. By acting deliberately, they give faculty and program leaders time to link sustainability to institutional mission.
• The most productive outcomes occur when external actors highlight issues and stimulate dialogue, and when institutions reflect on how to use that feedback to strengthen their programs.

 
Business schools today face a growing number of external expectations about how to teach sustainability. Societal urgency, political discourse, and public visibility have moved questions of responsible management and sustainable development from the margins of business curricula to their center. Increasingly, these expectations do not arrive through academic channels alone, but through ratings, benchmarks, and public assessments produced by external actors.

Such external influences present academic leaders with a practical dilemma. These signals—often well-intentioned and substantively relevant—arrive with public visibility and implicit expectations that are difficult to ignore.

It’s easy for school leaders to act quickly and instinctively: Acknowledge the signal, promise action, and look for visible adjustments that can be implemented quickly. But while this reaction can demonstrate responsiveness to the public, it can narrow the window of time that schools allot for internal deliberation before making strategic decisions.

The question is therefore not whether to engage with external actors, but how to do so without adopting change too quickly or outsourcing academic judgment or institutional identity.

This dilemma became tangible at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Switzerland. We became involved with WWF Switzerland (the World Wide Fund for Nature), a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that influences sustainability-related curriculum discussions at business schools. Our interactions with WWF Switzerland illustrate a simple but consequential insight: External actors can strengthen curricular development when they facilitate internal reflection rather than prescribe specific solutions.

When Ratings Become Wake-Up Calls

The WWF entered the higher education landscape in Switzerland as a public evaluator. For nearly a decade, the NGO has been periodically rating business schools at Swiss universities based on their approaches to sustainability. Its rating system assesses schools across five areas: teaching, research, knowledge transfer, governance, and campus and operations.

The organization has released its business school ratings in 2017, 2019, 2021, and most recently in 2024. Each report allows comparisons across institutions and generates public visibility well beyond academic circles. The NGO states that the purpose of its rating is to “identify how universities are integrating sustainability into their operations, structures and core missions and to serve as a compass for continuous improvement.”

Although WWF representatives are available for dialogue with school leadership, decisions regarding how to interpret and respond to the organization’s findings remain entirely within the institutions themselves. In this sense, WWF has acted as an external catalyst for reflection rather than as a partner in curricular design.

At first glance, the rating appears to be an external benchmark highlighting gaps and calling for improvement. When we first began discussing the rating results at Lucerne, our initial impulse was defensive, and our immediate internal reactions were largely comparative: Why is the integration of sustainability assessed more positively at other institutions? Does the result correspond to our own ambitions and self-understanding in this area? We questioned indicators, contextualized scores, and weighed our performance against that of peer schools.

Once our impulse to make those initial comparisons subsided, however, leadership faced a choice—to translate the results quickly into visible curricular adjustments or to pause. Our leaders chose the latter, framing the rating not as a to-do list, but as a trigger for internal deliberation. That decision proved consequential. What followed was both more productive and more challenging.

Once our initial impulse to make initial comparisons subsided, our leaders chose to frame the rating not as a to-do list, but as a trigger for internal deliberation.

As the focus of internal discussions shifted from compliance to coherence, we confronted more uncomfortable and ultimately more productive questions: Why does sustainability appear prominently in strategy documents but unevenly in curricula? How do program profiles relate to societal expectations? And who, internally, decides what “good” sustainability education actually means?

Program teams began asking not how to meet the expectations of external stakeholders, but how sustainability should relate to their educational philosophies and learning outcomes. They questioned whether the rating revealed a lack of shared understanding rather than a lack of content. Faculty discussions shifted from “Do we teach enough sustainability?” to “What role should sustainability play in our programs, given our mission and student population?”

WWF representatives were available to explain the logic of the assessment and engage in dialogue. School leaders and faculty could invite them to campus or, as we did, attend various seminars and workshops organized by the NGO. The real work, however, happened internally.

The Real Risk Is Acting Too Fast

When business schools are faced with public benchmarks, the greatest risk is not external influence, but internal acceleration. Institutional leaders often feel pressure to act quickly under public scrutiny—to demonstrate responsiveness, close gaps, and signal alignment.

In curriculum development, this can lead to well-meaning but problematic shortcuts: adding learning objectives without adjusting assessments, inserting sustainability topics without rethinking program logic, or launching isolated initiatives that lack integration.

This may satisfy external observers temporarily, but it comes at a cost. If schools push for too many changes at once, too quickly, faculty may experience reform fatigue. Students may encounter fragmented messages. Academic leaders risk weakening elements of the very educational identity they are trying to uphold—the coherence of program profiles, the underlying educational logic, and a shared understanding of what the institution stands for in its teaching.

Resisting the urge to “fix” the curriculum immediately proved crucial to our success. It allowed us to focus on truly strengthening how we integrated sustainability into our programs and institutional culture.

External Actors as Facilitators, Not Designers

Academic leaders should take one lesson to heart: The signals that external actors send about an institution’s programs are most valuable when they enable sensemaking, and most disruptive when they trigger pressure for quick fixes.

Ratings and similar initiatives can surface blind spots, challenge assumptions, and legitimize difficult conversations that might otherwise be postponed. What they should not do is replace internal governance processes or academic deliberation.

In the case of WWF’s rating, we derived value from its input precisely because the boundaries were clear. The NGO set the agenda by highlighting issues and making them visible. The institution retained control over interpretation, prioritization, and implementation. Decisions about curricula remained embedded in existing governance structures, involving program leaders, faculty, and quality assurance processes.

This balance is delicate. If external input is perceived as prescriptive, resistance grows quickly. If it is ignored, opportunities for learning are lost. Using external actors as facilitators requires academic leaders to invite dialogue and clarify roles. Most important, leaders should ensure that external impulses are translated into internal questions rather than external answers.

Keeping Identity Without Building Walls

At Lucerne, one concern that faculty voiced repeatedly in internal discussions was the fear of losing institutional identity. Would responding to external sustainability expectations by changing core disciplinary content dilute program profiles? Would it push all business schools toward the same curriculum template?

Addressing this concern required administrators and faculty to disentangle institutional identity from reflexive reactions to external pressure. Identity does not mean defending existing structures at all costs. Rather, it means clarifying educational purpose, values, and distinctive strengths—and using these criteria to decide which external ideas to adopt, adapt, or decline.

Here, a clear distinction between levels proves helpful. At the institutional level, questions of identity, mission, and program architecture must be negotiated deliberately and transparently. This is where leadership and governance play a central role.

At the individual level, however, faculty autonomy and experimentation are essential. Lecturers can engage with external partners, test new approaches, and innovate pedagogically—without every experiment immediately redefining the institution.

Identity does not mean defending existing structures at all costs. It means clarifying educational purpose, values, and distinctive strengths.

In our case, acknowledging this distinction reduced tension. Faculty engagement with sustainability increased once the discussion was anchored in concrete analytical tools rather than abstract expectations.

For this, we mapped coverage of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals across all programs, identifying where these topics were already present and where genuine gaps existed. We discussed the results in program- and module-level meetings, where we reflected on whether gaps reflected deliberate program choices, omissions in module descriptions, or curricular blind spots.

The goal was not to bolt additional sustainability courses onto the curriculum, but to encourage faculty to embed relevant perspectives within existing subject areas—through example selections, case studies, and stakeholder perspectives that connected sustainability to disciplinary content. Individual lecturers retained autonomy in how they implemented these elements in their modules, while leadership took a holistic view to ensure that coverage was balanced across the curriculum.

Practical Lessons for Academic Leaders

Four practical lessons emerged from this experience—lessons that, for us, have extended beyond sustainability and beyond a single NGO:

• First, external ratings and assessments should be used to open internal discussions, not to predetermine their direction. Their value lies in agenda-setting, not in providing ready-made solutions.
• Second, a slow response is a strategic choice. Creating space for reflection before acting helps avoid fragmented or symbolic responses and strengthens faculty ownership.
• Third, governance matters. Having clear processes for translating external impulses into internal decisions protects both autonomy and coherence. Ambiguity at this point is a recipe for conflict.
• Finally, identity is preserved not by ignoring external expectations, but by engaging with them on the institution’s own terms. External pressures can reveal where improvement is needed and inspire schools to address these areas deliberately. It’s important to view such input as an opportunity rather than a threat.

External Pressure as an Invitation

When business schools thoughtfully examine the input of external NGOs, as we did with the ratings from WWF Switzerland, certain questions become unavoidable. Whether those questions lead to innovation or to a loss of identity depends on how institutions organize their internal responses.

Seen this way, ratings and benchmarks are not instructions. They are invitations to reflect, negotiate meaning, and align educational practice with institutional purpose. Some institutions use these invitations to clarify priorities and strengthen coherence. Others respond by accelerating visible action, at the risk of bypassing the very conversations that sustain identity over time.

Accepting such external invitations thoughtfully has become one of the most important leadership tasks in contemporary management education.