AACSB Pulse: A New Vision for Business Schools
Podcast
Host Eileen McAuliffe, AACSB's executive vice president, chief thought leadership officer, and managing director of EMEA, holds a live, thought-provoking session at the AACSB Deans Conference in Toronto with Andrew J. Hoffman, Holcim (US) Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business. The two discuss how today’s business schools have strayed from their original purpose and explore ways they might find their way back to greater meaning and relevance for a changed world. They examine the following three big questions:
- How has the role of business schools changed in society, and where have you seen good examples of schools rejuvenating their curricula to align the power of business with its current role?
- How do you see the student-faculty dynamic evolving amid rising program costs and a growing consumerism mindset, and what can business school leaders do to better support that change?
- What role do business school deans play in driving the kind of transformation needed to better serve stakeholders and society in general?
Transcript
[00:00] Intro: Welcome to AACSB Pulse, the podcast that tackles critical topics in global business education today, three questions at a time. We talk with deans, industry leaders, and other big thinkers about the trends reshaping education, leadership, and the future of work. AACSB Pulse: Three big questions. Bold answers. Better business schools.
[00:25] Eileen McAuliffe: Good morning. I’m delighted to introduce our speaker, Andrew J. Hoffman, for a timely and thought-provoking conversation on a new vision for business schools. Andy Hoffman is the Holcim Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan, a position that holds joint appointments in the Stephen M. Ross School of Business and the School for Environment and Sustainability.
Backstage, Andy slipped into the conversation that last night he was awarded the 2025 [MBA] Professor of the Year with Poets&Quants—a tremendous achievement.
Andy’s academic work uses organizational behavioral theories to understand the cultural and institutional aspects of environmental issues for organizations. The disciplinary focus of this research is on theoretical questions surrounding institutional and cultural changes. The empirical focus is directed towards sustainability, the natural environment, and climate change.
[01:33] Eileen McAuliffe: He has published over 100 articles and chapters in 19 books, which have been translated into six languages. Andy’s latest book, Business School and the Noble Purpose of the Market: Correcting the Systemic Failures of Shareholder Capitalism, was published last April. His work has been covered in numerous outlets, including The New York Times, Scientific American, Time, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, The Atlantic, and NPR.
So welcome to this episode of AACSB Pulse from Toronto, Canada. So it’s a real pleasure to meet you and to record this, our episode with our AACSB members and here at the Deans conference together.
So let’s jump into our first of our big three questions. So your recent book, you make some bold statements in there. I’m going to read one out.
[02:28] Eileen McAuliffe: I know you said don’t read out, but I’m going to read it out because it is very good. “Today’s business schools were designed for a world that no longer exists,” and, “It is time to rejuvenate the business school curriculum to turn the power of business in the market towards a role that is more consistent with its place [with]in society.” So where have you seen good examples of this?
[02:49] Andy Hoffman: I’m not sure. The role of business in society has changed radically since the model we have right now of business schools—their impact in the social and the natural environment, their impact on politics, with technology, their impact on our society—and yet we’re still teaching some fairly stale notions that may have worked in the 1970s, when we were dealing with stagflation, we were dealing with a need to sort of open up business, but it’s time for it to change.
And I would add, by the way, I think that it’s time for business schools to start to play a stronger role in the debates within the world today. What is the purpose of the firm? The World Economic Forum, the Business Roundtable, even Blackrock tried to redefine it. I can find problems with every one of those definitions. But where are business schools? Where are business school professors?
[03:44] Andy Hoffman: Where’s the teaching in that conversation? It’s vacant.
[03:47] Eileen McAuliffe: So how did we get here if we’re so absent? I mean, I must tell you, there’s about 600 deans in this room from all over the world. So how did we get here? These are smart people.
[03:58] Andy Hoffman: I just want to make sure there’s a back door I can leave through. The history of the business school is very interesting one. Starting in the 1900s, maybe earlier in Europe. And around 1950, there was a commissioned study by the Ford Foundation, taking a look at the quality of the work that’s done, the research that’s done, and it really defined business schools as an intellectual wasteland. And that’s when you start to have—the pendulum really swung.
And then you have the formation of the ASQ and all the academic journals following the psychology/sociology model. And with that, our primary focus as scholars is research. Teaching is secondary. Teaching is a load. It’s something we want to dump. We want to focus on our research. The incentives, the reward systems to innovate in the classroom, are low.
[04:52] Andy Hoffman: And if you’re trying to get tenure, they’re probably negative because they’re going to take time away from the research you’ve done. So I just feel like the pendulum’s swung way too far. And the idea of innovating in the classroom is—for the individual faculty member—it’s of limited value.
Also for the school. I mean, we have become a business. We sell a product—it’s called the MBA or the BBA. We provide access to a network. As long as we keep making money for the university, things will go fine. But I think our call is much higher than that. And so I think it’s what we’ve become over time, and then the ossification of just being stuck in place. The rankings certainly stifle innovation. These all lead to how we got to where we are.
[05:36] Eileen McAuliffe: So lots of what you’ve just said there resonate with a lot of the conversations we’ve had over the last few days here, but particularly with some of the work of the—you’re familiar with the Global Research Impact Task Force and the work we’re trying to do there—but quite a lot of what you just said there resonates with what we’re trying to achieve there. This, this systemic shift, this pendulum shift. So you’re calling for a complete overhaul of the system?
[06:00] Andy Hoffman: Yeah.
[06:00] Eileen McAuliffe: How?
[06:02] Andy Hoffman: There’s the 64,000-dollar question. Because I don’t want to come out here and say I know how to tell all of you how to do your job. Or worse, to say, there’s a silver bullet—I have the one solution that’s going to work at every one of your schools. Every one of your schools is different. The context is different. How you do this is different. And it requires a desire and the political will to pull this off.
But, to begin, just put everything on the table. And it’s not just thinking in terms of a curriculum: we’ve got a two-year MBA, it has eight quarters, four quarters per class, let’s chunk out 32 pieces. There’s your curriculum, done.
Let’s start to think of small modules. Let’s start to think about transversal skills or apply it across the university. Let’s get out of the business school.
[06:50] Andy Hoffman: How do you get students out into engineering to learn about technological developments in certain areas, get them in the school of public policy, get them in the school of environment, sociology, community service. Broaden the education. Totally think outside the box.
You’re going to have to get faculty behind this, and I would not want that job. Faculty are very hard to corral, very hard to steer. I know that—I’m one of them. But I also, in the last five years or so, I sort of came to a realization in my own career, where I’ve rethought what I am as a professor and think of myself more as what I call an elder. And what I mean by that is, I am not focused on my own stature. I am not focused on more citation counts for a number that’s already big enough. I don’t need any more.
[07:48] Andy Hoffman: It’s not about me anymore. It’s about the next generation and the institutions through which they’ll come. And so, how do we get more senior professors to start to think like this?
I have a colleague who says the problem with our field is, we have too many senior professors thinking like junior professors. They keep chasing the same academic articles to add more to their resume. And I think one way to do that is to get people to recognize that our biggest impact as professors is our students. It is not our publications, it’s not our articles.
[08:21] Eileen McAuliffe: Thank you. There you go.
[08:25] Andy Hoffman: When I come to the end of my days and look back and say, was it a life well lived? My citation counts and my h-index will not show up—if it shows up in my obituary, I will come back and get the person who wrote it. And I say that jokingly because I’ve seen that happen, and I just find that really repulsive. I want it to be in the students that I touched, the students that I impacted. There’s our impact. There’s our impact in the world.
[08:50] Eileen McAuliffe: Well, I think, as you can sense from the mood in the room and the round of applause you just received, I think some people in this room, at least, are on the same page as you.
So you mentioned students a few minutes ago as well. Let’s turn to students in the curriculum. We’ve been talking about students in the last 24-48 hours as well. Our chief accreditation officer, Stephanie Bryant, led us into some of the changes to our standards that we’re looking at around prioritizing—not prioritizing, but leveling up—the focus on students as well as research. And I take your point there.
[09:26] Eileen McAuliffe: But turning to students in the curriculum, you write in your book, “business education and a business degree are two related but different things”—you’re smiling because you like this, obviously, I thought it was quite good—and suggest that students must take ownership of their learning by engaging in strong critical inquiry, debate, and personalizing their education experience.
So I’m going to just play devil’s advocate here. The cost of a graduate program continues to rise, but shouldn’t it be even more the faculty’s role to guide students through this process? So there is this consumerism aspect knocking around that’s really quite unhelpful, I think. But how do you see that student-faculty dynamic developing? And what can we in this room do to change, redirect, support that changing position?
[10:27] Andy Hoffman: That quote about school and education, it actually borrows from Mark Twain, who has a wonderful line. He says, “I [have] never let [my schooling] get in the way of my education.” You know, faculty certainly have to lead. The schools have to provide a curriculum. Let me take that back. Because if we just think in terms of courses and degrees, how do we change that? Someone comes in, and they’re put in an environment, and it’s more of a journey or an experience where they come out a different person. And so we have to do that. We have to create that environment.
But what I’m saying in the book is, right now, the environment’s not there. So if you’re a student thinking about going to business school, I say, recognize that business schools are broken. Go anyway.
[11:16] Andy Hoffman: The power you have to make a difference in the world is enormous. But take control of your education. If you just go in and say, OK, tell me the 32 credits or 32 courses I have to take to get my degree, I’ll take those courses and I’m done, you are missing the opportunity before you.
Everyone knows that a significant portion of learning is in between classes. It’s not in the classroom, it’s between classes. It’s in clubs. Students can organize a conference, they can invite a speaker, they can do an independent study. They could just knock on a professor’s door. I’m stunned how few students do that. They’re so afraid to approach faculty—and for good reason. I know a lot of faculty would just slam the door back in their face, but a lot of them will say, let’s talk.
[11:57] Andy Hoffman: But that requires a different mindset on the faculty’s part to be more of a mentor. And as we’re a business and we want to get more and more butts in seats and raise more revenues, that becomes harder. And certainly the cost of education is one of the big drivers here.
I do find it distressing when students call themselves customers. In that case, they are no longer active players in their education. But what I try and tell students, you’re dropped into a resource-rich environment. Make use of it. Go to seminars in other schools. There are 17 other schools at the University of Michigan besides the business school. They’re all top notch. What are you doing only staying within the confines of this building? Get out there, make it what you want it to be.
[12:39] Andy Hoffman: Independent studies are a phenomenal way to just say, I’m going to develop my own course, I’m going to teach myself, and I’m going to develop the networks that I need to go forward. You can do that when you’re calling up and saying, I’m a student at such and such a university, would you talk to me? Business people typically will. If you wait until graduation time and say, I’m looking for an informational interview to talk to me, the odds of them talking to you are much lower.
And so building those networks, getting that going, make it what you want it to be. That’s the only option before students right now until we change.
But you mentioned the cost. And that certainly is a driver when students measure the value of an education on return, on investment.
[13:19] Andy Hoffman: But I see something else here that we should be alarmed by. I don’t know about your schools, but I’m seeing a bifurcation of students. Some students: I just want the degree. I don’t care about the education. You’ll find them not going to class, shirking on group projects, things like that. And the other students saying, where’s the rigor? I want something more. And so if they’re just looking at, I bought something, give it to me, what are they actually buying? They’re buying that degree, they’re buying access to a network.
I have a thought experiment. I’ll never do it, of course, but if we lined up all the students said, here are two doors. Go through this door, you’ll pay us your money, you’ll get two years’ education, you’ll get a degree, you’re on your way.
[14:07] Andy Hoffman: Go through this door, pay us your money, we’ll give you a degree right now. You’re on your way. How many would take the second door? I would be scared to know that number because, I think, a lot.
I remember hearing a recruiter at a top consulting firm saying one time, quite frankly, we’d rather recruit from the acceptance list of the top business schools than the graduate list to save them a heck of a lot of money. If the zeitgeist of what I just said is true, and the quality of our education is secondary and we’re merely access to a network, once someone finds another way around into that network, our place is gone. And that’s, I think, a dangerous place to be.
[14:44] Eileen McAuliffe: We had yesterday presenting with us the CEO of SHRM, Johnny Taylor. And he was talking about how hiring managers, recruiting managers, they tend to value achievement, strong work ethic, critical skills—not necessarily those that have come out with a degree certificate. So do you think the value of a degree is becoming outdated?
[15:08] Andy Hoffman: I think people are questioning it, certainly. There was just an article in The Atlantic—Do the top tier schools need to stay top tier? It’s a very interesting article.
[15:17] Eileen McAuliffe: Why do you think they do? Is it academic arrogance?
[15:20] Andy Hoffman: Well, there’s an aura that can stick, but some schools are finding that it’s starting to slide. The article points out Columbia is starting to slide. Students looking and saying, you know, I can go to a top-tier—and this isn’t just business school, it’s across the board—but I could go to a top tier school. I’m going to pay a heck of a lot of money, I’m going to get in line and compete to get in the classes I want. I may get time with my professor, but chances are they’re not going to be available. I’m going to be surrounded by students who are going to have sharp elbows and kind of elbow me out of the way, and the job prospects aren’t that great when I graduate.
[15:53] Eileen McAuliffe: We heard yesterday.
[15:54] Andy Hoffman: Yeah. So maybe this isn’t where I want to go. And maybe I want to go to a school that’s going to have more interest in me as a person and help me develop as a person.
I think this speaks to a broader debate that I see happening in higher education writ large with people like Anthony Kronman, the former dean of the Yale Law School has a wonderful book called Education’s End: Why Colleges and Universities [Have Given Up on] the Meaning of Life. Derek Bok is writing about this, David Brooks is writing about this.
We used to—higher education overall—help students find a meaningful philosophy in life to live a satisfying and rich life. And now we provide skills to get a job. And again, the tuition is high, so they need to be able to come out and justify the experience.
[16:38] Andy Hoffman: But how do we fix the tuition problem? But also how do we get back to that original spirit of who we are as educators and not just focusing on our academic publications and the letters after our names and the awards that we get if we become so insular that’s all that matters? Trust me, the rest of the world doesn’t care.
If any of you are not—married to someone who’s not an academic, I’m sure you’ve heard it goes, what is this ASQ stuff? Who cares about that? My wife says it all the time. Or I can tell you, in Ann Arbor, there’s a lot of people who live in Ann Arbor who are hesitant to invite a professor to dinner. They don’t want to get lectured to.
[17:21] Andy Hoffman: When I hear professors in polite company say, well, you know, the literature says, I just want to scream because what are you saying? Shut up. I know the literature. You don’t engage in conversation.
[17:31] Eileen McAuliffe: Yeah, that resonates. It really does. It really does resonate.
So we’re moving on. We’re just moving out of time, and I want to make sure that we have opportunity for the audience to ask you some hopefully provocative questions.
But just one final question. We have nearly 600 deans in this room, as I mentioned. What role do they play in driving this kind of transformation?
[17:57] Andy Hoffman: I am not naive to the challenges of steering faculty. Even presidents—it’s a very difficult thing to do. But how can you start the conversation? How can you start the conversation among the faculty that may behind this? How do you engage the students? Are they getting frustrated at the quality of their education? I’m seeing it with our students.
What is on the table? Can you really blow up the curriculum and start from scratch? Maybe you do it as a side program and see how it plays out and eventually subsume the other. There are multiple ways to do this, but think outside the box. Don’t just chase your peers. It drives me nuts when you go to a dean and say, can we talk about doing this? And the first question is, well, are our peer schools doing it? I’m like, that’s not leadership.
[18:47] Andy Hoffman: That’s fast-following. So how do we step out beyond that? I know that the rankings are scary. If we drop in the rankings, the dean’s going to have a difficult time holding her job.
[19:00] Eileen McAuliffe: But should we nuke the rankings?
[19:04] Andy Hoffman: [laughs]
[19:07] Eileen McAuliffe: I have no other motive than asking you a straightforward question.
[19:09] Andy Hoffman: I don’t know how you do that. I really don’t. I would love to see that, but the market wants it. Students look, recruiters use it, faculty use it in schools they go to. But how do we diminish the role? Or how do we get multiple metrics rather than a singular metric of where you are on a ranking? It’s similar to the debate—right now we use GDP as a singular metric of national economic health, even though Kuznets, who developed it, said, do not use this as a singular metric of national economic health. That’s what we do. And so we use the FT ranking. There it is. That’s all that matters. And if you drop out of number 10, you freak out. If you drop out of number 20, you freak out. Whatever. I go back to David Brooks’ comment.
[19:51] Andy Hoffman: What if we had more heterogeneity of business schools, where you want to be this kind of business leader, you go there; if you want to be this kind, you go there, and rather than, everybody’s trying to be the same thing. I don’t know how you crack that, but we have to figure out a way.
[20:06] Eileen McAuliffe: OK, so we’re coming to the end of the three big questions, but one thing, one ask of these deans—just one. What would that be?
[20:13] Andy Hoffman: Oh, boy. OK, you want to go to the holy of holies? Go back and start thinking about, tinkering with your reward system. The reward system. The folly of a rewarding A while hoping for B. Our reward system says academic publications primarily matter. I mean capital R[esearch], small T[eaching], infinitesimal S[ervice]. We’ve added a fourth criteria at Ross called practice—your impact in the world of business. How do we broaden the journals that we consider valuable?
I find it frustrating when schools say these are the only journals that matter—it could be as small as seven journals. That’s the only place where valuable knowledge is generated, while the world is blowing up in terms of its available platforms to reach different audiences. And if we just put these narrow blinders on, of just saying that the only valuable work is done in these journals, it’s anti-intellectual.
Eileen McAuliffe (left) and Andy Hoffman (right) during a keynote session at AACSB's Deans Conference in Toronto.
[21:19] Eileen McAuliffe: You heard it here first. So now we have the opportunity for 10, 15 minutes for some questions.
[21:25] Andy Hoffman: OK.
[21:26] Eileen McAuliffe: Are you up for this?
[21:27] Andy Hoffman: Yeah, sure.
[21:28] Eileen McAuliffe: OK.
[21:28] Andy Hoffman: I hope I stirred some thinking.
[21:29] Eileen McAuliffe: Let’s get the lights up and see where we’re going. OK, we have number two over here. Thank you.
[21:40] Frédéric Brunel: Frédéric Brunel, Andy. How are you?
[21:42] Andy Hoffman: Good, how are you? Oh, hey, Fred, how are you?
[21:47] Frédéric Brunel: You mentioned that we should have business schools that graduate different types of students, each with their own purposes and positioning. How do you reconcile this with the AACSB accreditation standards—the ratios and everything else that we have in place in some other ways? Is AACSB part of the problem?
[22:11] Andy Hoffman: I mean, anything that confines the space for innovation is, I mean, there’s a role for some kind of standards. But, I don’t know if the idea of allowing students to discover who they are is antithetical to the idea of standards of what is a business school.
Every student in my classroom, just like every person in this room, has a different purpose, has a different vocation, has a different calling. We’re all individual, unique people. And when you have a curriculum that students go through that is identical—one to the next, to the next—doesn’t allow any kind of opportunity for students to explore who they are, then I think at best, students are getting a poor education. Mostly they’re getting an education designed for somebody else.
[23:03] Andy Hoffman: So to the core of your question, I think we can bring in personalization, we can bring nurturing, we can bring in more mentorship. It requires more time. I mentor students and I even mentor them after they graduate. It takes time. And there are times where it’s just like, jeez, I have to add this to my calendar. But it’s what matters. It’s what counts.
If you were to look at surveys, the number-one factor in students feeling that they got a good education is a personal relationship with a professor. And yet we are growing the size of our classrooms. I know at Ross we have a floor. Your drop life, below 30, your class is probably going to get canceled because there’s a profit there. How do we change that?
[23:49] Andy Hoffman: So I’d like to think that we can personalize the education and then work on the AACSB question as a separate one.
[24:01] Eileen McAuliffe: Very diplomatically put, Andy, well done. We have number four over here.
[24:04] Luis Pérez: Hello, Andy. Luis Pérez, Texas A&M International. Always a pleasure to hear your talks, and I appreciate this dialogue. How do you engage alumni, by the way? I’m very curious about the role of alumni, the boards, the advisory councils that we have in our schools. So how do you go about planting that seed so that the connection with the student is also alive and well from that perspective? Thank you.
[24:32] Andy Hoffman: Well, I think that alumni are the eyes and ears of the university. They’re the eyes and the ears of the deans that they can give some insights on where the education works. What did I get, what didn’t I get through my degree? How is the business world changing? And then connecting those alumni with students. And to go further, I think, you know, as we start to blow up the idea of the standard curriculum, how do we bring lifelong learning into this? And I’m not just talking about executive education, but keep a touchpoint with the alumni.
I run a program called Management as a Calling and it involves some series of retreats. In the first, the beginning of their final year, the second, end of their final year to discern their calling and management.
[25:17] Andy Hoffman: I take away their cell phones and their computers and run them through these exercises to do what Fred is suggesting of, who are you as a person, why are you here? And then I do it again a year after they graduate. Why can’t we keep doing that? Why can’t we keep those ties and not just asking for money, but they can learn from us and we can learn from them.
And then alumni are donors so they can influence what the school is doing. They are parents, and there’s an odd chance that their children may go to your school. They can have influence there. I think the business community has a very strong role to play in rejuvenating the business education, and that business community, a subset of it, is alumni from your school.
[26:05] Eileen McAuliffe: Thank you. We had number three over here.
[26:07] Kelly Lendsay: Andy—Kelly Lendsay with Luminary.
[26:10] Andy Hoffman: Hi.
[26:12] Kelly Lendsay: I sought you out two years ago and met you, sought your advice on how we connect business schools with indigenous businesses, economies, and communities to advance well-being. And your advice was great. In your first book, you talked about the decay of truth and the importance of relevance and are we relevant. And you said, this is fascinating, that we’re bringing the indigenous world to the business schools in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the States, and around the world today. You talked about a calling, and I think you’re really onto something.
And I was really taken by your use of the word elder, and I mean in the indigenous community—this is very common in Indian communities and other nations around the world. So I challenge you to create an elders council because we need more thinkers like you.
[26:57] Kelly Lendsay: And I think a circle of thinkers like you is actually going to transform our business schools, create that calling.
You know, there’s a well-being movement around the world. Twenty-two nations have now adopted well-being measures beyond GDP measures, starting with Jacinda Ardern. But how we can embrace some indigenous thinking around well-being, the well-being of the land, people, economies, communities, linking it to your idea of a cause. I think you’re onto something and look forward to seeing how we can support you.
And your ideas on where and how can you instill that cause marketing or that cause philosophy in before K–12, in children before they even get to our business schools. Your thoughts on that, sir?
[27:42] Andy Hoffman: Well, I don’t know if I’m ready to dive into the K–12 question—it’s really not an area of expertise. But what I like about your question is, are there different ways we can conceive of a market and an economy? Indigenous thinking offers one. If you’ve read Small Is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher, he has a chapter in there called “Buddhist Economics.” I think it’s brilliant. There’s no such thing, of course, but he’s saying, what would economics look like if it was animated by Buddhist principles? Another way of thinking about this.
A few years ago there was a book that came out called Cathonomics. What would the economy look like if it was animated by Catholic social teaching? Again, a different lens.
[28:26] Andy Hoffman: This is important not only for reconceiving what the economy is, but also recognizing that, are our business schools primarily focused on sending people to the Fortune 500 or the Fortune 50 top big businesses? What if someone wants to start a business in an indigenous community or start a business in Tanzania? Does our education help them do that? Do we teach about low-profit LLCs, co-ops, ESOPs? Many different ways of structuring this. I find that we typically teach one way of doing this when in fact the business environment is very heterogeneous.
And so the idea of bringing other ways of thinking into our education is both illuminating for the possibilities but also cognizant of the realities of our world today, where people are starting to ask questions about the dominant model, and certainly with First Nations communities, the extent to which the economy has done serious damage. How do we correct that?
[29:25] Eileen McAuliffe: Great, Andy, we have quite a few hands up, so I’m going to try and get through them.
[29:29] Marilyn Wiley: Good morning. Marilyn Wiley, University of North Texas. You Have a diversity of schools in this room. You have highly ranked, reputed, aspirational schools with lots of resources. You have smaller schools that serve a more working-class, part-time community. If we’re trying to create a change across the landscape of business schools, does it need to start in one of those places more than another?
[29:56] Eileen McAuliffe: That’s a good question.
[29:57] Andy Hoffman: Good question.
[29:57] Eileen McAuliffe: Marilyn, thank you so much.
[29:59] Andy Hoffman: I will answer that definitely, but let’s keep going.
[30:00] Eileen McAuliffe: Get a couple of others.
[30:02] Andreas Altmann: My name is Andreas Altmann. I’m from Innsbruck, Austria, from MCI, director. I really liked your speech. But there was one statement which really surprised me. How come you think European schools are blindly following the American model? And in case there is a notion like this, shouldn’t it be the other way around? Not blindly, but at least have a look at more at different parts of the world and what and how to learn from them?
[30:34] Eileen McAuliffe: Andreas, that’s a great question. And we had, Audrey, there was one near you.
[30:39] Audience Member: Thank you so much. I would like to pull the lens back, so to speak, because you did mention Joe Stiglitz, and I wonder if you think that there is a justification for an indictment of economists in general and study of economics and society. Thank you.
[31:19] Andy Hoffman: Sure. And I presume you don’t mean criminal indictment.
[31:24] [audience laughs]
[31:27] Eileen McAuliffe: OK, so.
[31:28] Andy Hoffman: So the first question I think is a great one. I mean, we teach innovation. The question, who innovates and why? And our research tells us the big incumbents that succeed at the existing system will maintain the status quo and the new entrants will innovate. Is that true in our world, I wonder? I do.
And so, can schools that aren’t as caught up in the rankings race be more flexible and more malleable, more nimble to respond quickly to the environment? I think that’s a great question. And is there a value proposition there that these schools could put forward? And can they be the incubators for new ideas that will fundamentally change our ecosystem? I think that’s a fair question, so to that one.
[32:19] Andy Hoffman: Why are, you know, the EU’s schools—maybe I shouldn’t put the word blindly in there, but that was in the paper that I found—but I see schools around the world chasing this A-level publication model to the point offering bounties. Certain Asian schools, you publish in the top-tier journals, will give you a bonus, which is a bounty, and really measuring their impact. And I think the rankings can drive that, and I would like to see them stop doing that. And so, I look at some EU schools, and I love the model—much more connected to business.
[32:54] Eileen McAuliffe: Andy, I’m going to interrupt you there. A few weeks ago, you were in Europe—just to dispel any kind of notion that you’re anti-European in any way—
[33:01] Andy Hoffman: Oh, not at all. No. I admire.
[33:03] Eileen McAuliffe: Not at all. But were chatting online and you said, I’m here at X school. They’re doing some fantastic stuff. I think, I can’t remember where it was. IMD or something.
[33:11] Andy Hoffman: It was IMD. Yeah.
[33:12] Eileen McAuliffe: Just earlier I asked you for exemplars of schools that were doing good work. You were waxing lyrical about it.
[33:19] Andy Hoffman: Yeah, IMD is really connected to the business environment. They have a couple of things going for them that not all schools have. One, they’re heavily focused on exec ed, so if they’re not in touch with what’s going on in the business world, they will fall out. Another benefit they have is they have no departments, and I understand the need for departments, but they also create fiefdoms, and fiefdoms that try and protect turf and lose the spirit of the overall university.
And then I also see some schools are doing right. I was at Emlyon—the extent to which they’re focusing on sustainability is really admirable. Erasmus has really anchored its program on the Sustainable Development Goals. I think that’s really fantastic. So there are schools that are doing this.
[33:59] Andy Hoffman: And the indictment of economics. Yeah, I devote a considerable amount of attention in the book to the extent to which economics is has dominated the social sciences. And what’s embedded in economics is that people are inherently selfish, driven by avarice and greed, that’s what motivates people. If it makes more money, it’s rational from an economic point of view, even if it may be irrational for society, the extent to which it has been elevated through, for example, the Nobel Prize, which I’m sure you all know is not actually a Nobel Prize. It wasn’t part of the original Nobel gift. It was started by the National Bank of Sweden. The Nobel family has tried to sue to have them stop calling it the Nobel Prize. They haven’t succeeded.
[34:44] Andy Hoffman: Interestingly, Hayek, who won one of the first Nobel Prizes in economics, he devoted his speech to saying, this prize is a really bad idea because it gives an individual in a very narrow discipline too much power, too much influence. And I like to teach my students the model from Graham Allison’s book the Essence of Decision. And just to cut to the punchline, he just lays out that there’s the rational sciences, the behavioral sciences, the political sciences—all of them give us a lens on what’s going on—and yet we just all focus on the rational and defining rational as what makes money. And that’s where we are. So, I definitely...
[35:24] Eileen McAuliffe: OK, we have time for maybe, just if we take two more questions. Number one here, please.
[35:30] Yinka David-West: My name is Yinka David-West from Lagos Business School in Nigeria. So how would you, what advice would you give deans in emerging markets, sub–Saharan Africa, to stop following? Thank you.
[35:41] [Andy, audience laughter]
[35:42] Eileen McAuliffe: Yinka, as always, very provoking. Is there one—number two here, please.
[35:47] Audience Member: My question is, what do you think of doctoral education in business schools? And like, how should that change? Not all doctoral students, even though they’re trained in the very high R1 model, even end up in those schools. Are they being well trained? And how does the change start there? Thank you.
[36:06] Eileen McAuliffe: Thank you.
[36:06] Andy Hoffman: That’s a great question. OK, so how do schools in other parts of the world stop following the model? I mean, is the first step just being tightly connected to what your business environment needs, where your graduates are going to go? Does an education in business, à la New York City, serve business in Nigeria? I would have a hard time believing the answer to that question is yes. So how do you make sure that you don’t become so disconnected from the business community you’re serving?
At the end of the day, we’re professional schools. We should be concerned with the profession we profess to serve. And that profession is local and regional—it’s not international. And yet many schools only look at the international level. So that may be where I’d answer your question.
[36:54] Andy Hoffman: Doctoral education is a great question. Why do we have the perpetuation of the departments we have? Accounting, finance, strategy, OB, operations. Because we train our doctoral students in those disciplines. Therefore, their skill set defines what those programs could be. And what do we teach them? In my doctoral program, we do a little bit of teaching. My personal PhD, I never learned how to teach. I never had a course on teaching. It was all research, 100 percent, with a lot of the logic being, why should I learn how to teach until I’m getting paid to teach? Because I got to get this degree done and move on. We need to fix that.
I say in the book, and I haven’t gotten anyone nailing me on this yet, so I’ll put it out there and see if someone’s going to nail me on this.
[37:39] Andy Hoffman: But I find a tremendous irony that you can’t get into most business schools without five years’ work experience. You can’t get into the MBA program. But you can get into the PhD program straight out of an undergrad. Because for these people, business will always be a theoretical construct. And that I find highly problematic. Now, maybe we can change doctoral education so that they have more experience within business. Not sure how to do that, but I just find that highly problematic.
And also, man, we are admitting students into our PhD program now that already have academic publications. I mean, that’s insanity. Where’s just the spirit of learning? It can be very careerist.
[38:24] Andy Hoffman: And so—I’m going to make myself very unpopular with some people in the doctoral programs back at Michigan for saying this—at the end of the day, if we’re going to turn this ship, we have to change the entire ecosystem. That includes not just the curriculum, but also who we admit, how we are training people, how we’re rewarding people, we have to change the journals.
Now, the good news is, I think I see a lot of individual pockets. What’s happening at AACSB, what’s happening at RRBM, the Impact Scholars Network, individual faculty, Sydney Finkelstein’s speech here in 2022 was a great shot across the bow. And so, the momentum seems to be building, and certainly external forces are pushing it. If we don’t figure out how to rethink how we teach in the face of AI, then get ready to become obsolete.
[39:17] Andy Hoffman: And then the political winds of change. You know, I find it instructive what Alan Garber is doing at Harvard, is saying, look, I will defend this institution from these attacks from Washington, but not all of the attacks are unfounded. There’s a kernel of truth there. And if we can look at that and figure out how we fix things, certainly the support for higher education in the United States is low. And why is that? Well, it costs a fortune to go, the research we do—does it have really value in business? Find me a business person who’s ever read, much less heard of, Administrative Science Quarterly.
So how do we change the whole system? All we can do is focus on what’s within our zone of influence. I’m trying to work on mine. And hopefully, if enough people start to do this, it will coalesce into a movement.
[40:05] Andy Hoffman: We can think about it like the beginning of an S curve. It will turn, it will start to grow. Change happens slow, slow, slow, and then all of a sudden, fast. That’s my hope, and all I can have is hope that this will happen.
[40:14] Eileen McAuliffe: And I think that has been absolutely the message of the conference, really, from the various speakers and the presentations. There is something around shifting that dial more the other way now.
So, Andy, it has been a pleasure. As much as I would have loved to have sit and chatted with you a bit longer, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. And your expertise, your views, but that compelling vision that you’ve shared with us has really given us food for thought.
If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow AACSB Pulse on AACSB Insights or the normal platform that you use to download your podcasts.
Please join me in thanking Andy for the tremendous session.
[40:50] [audience applause]
[40:55] Eileen McAuliffe: Well done, my friend.
About AACSB Pulse
A podcast produced by AACSB International, AACSB Pulse explores current topics impacting global business education—three questions at a time—with business school deans, industry leaders, and other big thinkers of today.
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