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(Martin Parker has taught at business schools since 1995, including at Warwick, Leicester and Keele Universities. He is currently Professor at the Department of Management, University of Bristol)-Photo: PLUTO PRESS

N.B. This Call is Music to my ears. That is, until such a time that all the business schools around the world, acknowledge and adopt My Economics and Business Educators’ Oath: My Promise to My Students, or produce a similar document, whilst more importantly, atone for their past mistakes, repent and demonstrate how they may form their new moral and spiritual compass and find the path to values-led education in the interest of the common good.

However, sadly, given my own hard-earned experience, I firmly believe this to be highly unlikely. Thus,  I am joining with Prof. Martin Parker, by endorsing his noble Call, as I am of the opinion that indeed our universities are not universities anymore.

Shut Down the Business School 

What's Wrong with Management Education

‘Business schools are institutions which, a decade after the financial crash, continue to act as loudspeakers for neoliberal capitalism with all its injustices and planetary consequences. In this lively and incendiary call to action, Martin Parker offers a simple message: shut down the business school.

Parker argues that business schools are 'cash cows' for the contemporary university that have produced a generation of unreflective managers, primarily interested in their own personal rewards. If we see universities as institutions with responsibilities to the societies they inhabit, then we must challenge the common notion that 'the market' should be the primary determinant of the education they provide.

Shut Down the Business School makes a compelling case for a radical alternative, in the form of a 'School for Organising'. This institution would develop and teach on different forms of organising, instead of reproducing the dominant corporate model, enabling individuals to discover alternative responses to the pressing issues of inequality and sustainability faced by all of us today.’-PLUTO PRESS

Read more:

Why we should bulldoze the business school

By Martin Parker

Photo: chronicle.com

'There are 13,000 business schools on Earth. That’s 13,000 too many. And I should know – I’ve taught in them for 20 years.’

‘Visit the average university campus and it is likely that the newest and most ostentatious building will be occupied by the business school. The business school has the best building because it makes the biggest profits (or, euphemistically, “contribution” or “surplus”) – as you might expect, from a form of knowledge that teaches people how to make profits.

Business schools have huge influence, yet they are also widely regarded to be intellectually fraudulent places, fostering a culture of short-termism and greed. (There is a whole genre of jokes about what MBA – Master of Business Administration – really stands for: “Mediocre But Arrogant”, “Management by Accident”, “More Bad Advice”, “Master Bullshit Artist” and so on.) Critics of business schools come in many shapes and sizes: employers complain that graduates lack practical skills, conservative voices scorn the arriviste MBA, Europeans moan about Americanisation, radicals wail about the concentration of power in the hands of the running dogs of capital. Since 2008, many commentators have also suggested that business schools were complicit in producing the crash.’...Continue to read