Academics are human beings. Pick a human flaw and they have it. Of course, human beings are better at seeing the flaws in arguments that they don’t approve of than those they nod along to. This holds for academics. After all academics can be biased too. Allen Mendenhall and Daniel Stutter, two senior scholars one of whom is now at the Heritage Foundation (a Conservative think tank), aimed to point out bias in the way that business schools now teach. It is always worth thinking about any critique, but to my mind they mostly end up showing their own bias.
Is Managing Public Relations Woke Now?
According to Mendenhall and Stutter, business schools are too left wing. The authors use a dual attack on business schools that is common but doesn’t really make sense, namely that:
- Business schools teach managers to ignore profits with the study of stakeholder management.
- Stakeholder management is just a sham to make more money.
If stakeholder management is just a sham to make more money it is pretty strange that these authors don’t approve. After all they think managers should exclusively concentrate on making money.
Economic Progress And Business
The strange thing is that I agree with them on a central point. Business can get people out of poverty. When I teach the UN SDGs I emphasize this point. I agree with them that it is really important. Yet, despite the fact that they say business gets people out of poverty they don’t want business schools to mention the UN SDGs. Number 1 of the SDGs is getting people out of poverty. You’d have thought they want to take the win for business but no. Although they think business gets people out of poverty, for some reason they don’t want us talking about getting people out of poverty in business classes. They want people to approve of business. Yet, they absolutely don’t want anyone mentioning any good things business can do for society. It is a truly odd position.
The UN SDGs And Business
They see the UN SDGs as anti-business. Are they right? Look at the SDGs. They were agreed by countries that are strongly committed to business. Even a superficial glance shows that business is perfectly compatible with the SDGs, see especially SDG 8, 9, and 12.
The UN SDGs represent such a wide range of important things about the world. If the authors view is that business shouldn’t be helping to deliver any of the 17 SDGs what then is business for in their mind?
Pitting Profts Against People
I agree with them that we shouldn’t pit making profits against helping people. The evidence the authors provide that business schools are all about pitting profits against people is one unfortunate sub-heading on an article by the AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business). Call me too cautious but one badly written headline, probably written by an English, not a business, grad, is hardly compelling evidence that business schools are now anti-economic progress. Indeed, many of us teach the 3Ps. Yes, we care about planet and people, but profit is right there in the 3Ps too.
Correlation Does Not Imply Causation
It is always fun to be able to tell academics that correlation does not imply causation. The authors want to make a point. Still, their motivated desire to make their point backed up by a correlation is hardly a strong theoretical basis for a conclusion. The authors say:
Consider the Financial Times’s global top 100 MBA programs. While less than a quarter of American schools on the list are PRME signatories, nearly 90 percent of top-rated Canadian and European programs have signed on. This suggests that business schools may be more likely to embrace social activism in nations with greater centralized control over higher education.
Mendenhall and Sutter (2025)
They don’t like PRME (the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education). I’m not really sure why, but let’s take that as a given and address the argument from their perspective.
Does Their Argument Make Sense?
Firstly, to support their point they really need to show more about the impact of centralization. In Georgia we have a powerful central system that controls public education, the University System of Georgia (USG). Yet, despite the central power that USG has, it hasn’t forced us at the University of Georgia to adopt PRME. It is almost as though other factors, like local politics (or one million and one other things) matter to decision making and their correlation doesn’t really demonstrate anything much about centralized control.
Secondly, and more hilariously, if their assertion were true doesn’t this statement completely undermine their main point? According to the authors US business schools en masse are running off adopting stakeholder thinking. Still, less than a quarter of US schools have signed PRME, which is all about stakeholder thinking. Logically this means that three quarters of US school haven’t adopted the approach that the authors suggest is evidence for a left-wing takeover.
Maybe it is a super-secret takeover. Business schools are all bastions of wokeness but wokeness is so clever and clandestine about its takeover that no one has told the administrators, faculty, or students in 75% of US business schools.
Academics Can Be Biased Too
Academic can be biased too. It could be me being biased, could be them. Always likely to be a bit of both, but it is super easy for me to see the flaws in their, clearly very flawed, arguments.
To break the tie, we might consider if the general public thinks business isn’t concentrating enough on profits. Business has a pretty wretched reputation and a lot of that comes from business being seen to be willing to harm people and the planet to make a buck. I think the bad reputation of business is because of ideas spread by people like Mendenhall and Stutter.
Where I agree with them is that we should discuss their ideas. Their claims that business shouldn’t be connected to making the world better, indeed business can screw over everyone that doesn’t have ownership of the company, are precisely what business schools should be talking about. I’m all in favor of letting them make their point. Most people will see how wrong they are.
For more discussion of wokeness see Stakeholder Management As A Threat, Woke As A Magical Term, and Woke-Washing: A Big Deal?
Read: Allen Mendenhall, Daniel Sutter (2025) Business Schools Are Embracing Left-Wing Activism: Many institutions no longer teach students how to flourish in a free-market system, City Journal, August 20
