As the male sex loses power and is increasingly troubled, few people think: OK, well, in the name of moderation, we should now take the foot off the accelerator. Instead, they think: Great, now we can put the boot in even more!
For example, two recent opeds in the New York Times:
Want to Address Sexual Assault? Make Fraternities Admit Women
You see, fraternities are incredibly dangerous for women, so they should be neutered by filling them up with women.
Or something.
Don’t ask me to explain it, just realize it’s the Trend of the Times. The Establishment did the same thing to the Boy Scouts because … well, nobody is too sure why, other than because all-male institutions are evil (other than Castro Street bathhouses, which are sacred).
And:
I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down.
By Chris Marquis
Mr. Marquis is a professor at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School and the author of “The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profit and Socializes Cost.”
Oct. 18, 2026
MBA programs are one of the last academic institutions where there are slightly more male than female students: e.g., the Harvard Business School was 55% male in 2024.
So … exterminate the brutes!
This fall, another cohort of ambitious young professionals has arrived at business schools around the world for two-year programs with price tags in the six figures. Their presence at some of the nicest and shiniest buildings on campus renews a familiar question: What exactly is an M.B.A. for?
This question has become more urgent as business education has expanded dramatically in the past decades. Today, nearly one in five American undergraduates majors in business, and the M.B.A. is the most popular graduate degree in the United States. …
I’ve come to realize that business schools don’t just reflect our economic system — they actively manufacture its priorities and normalize its harms, training the future leaders who will design and defend the structures driving our overlapping global crises. Tinkering at the margins with a class on corporate responsibility or ethics is not going to help. We don’t need to “fix” business schools. We need to abolish them.
Business schools have always struggled to justify their place in the university. A medical school’s core justification is health, and a law school’s is justice — undisputed public goods. Business schools are organized explicitly around a private good: the pursuit of profit. The American sociologist Thorstein Veblen identified this tension a century ago, criticizing university schools focused on commerce because they “need imply nothing in the way of serviceability to the common good.”
After all, what has prosperity ever done for America?
When schools like Wharton and Harvard Business School were established, they were seen as overly vocational, and to build legitimacy their founders framed management as a profession, on par with law and medicine. But education in those fields rested on established bodies of knowledge — centuries of case law, natural sciences like biology — that management lacked.
The solution, devised in the 1920s by the Harvard dean Wallace Donham, was to borrow the teaching style used in law and medicine: the case study. It became the signature method of business education. To this day, professors assign 10- to 20-page descriptions of business challenges culminating in a decision point that students then debate in class.
It’s a fun way to learn.
Business courses also have the advantage that they tend to talk about problems that are more plausibly-sized for young people. As an undergraduate, I dealt with questions like: “What should Napoleon have done instead of invading Russia?” They were enjoyable to spout off upon, but, realistically, they tended to seem a little over my pay grade at age 18.
In MBA school at age 21, in contrast, we got questions that I could imagine myself tackling on the job pretty soon, like: “Is there a big enough market for this proposed brand of ultra-luxury gourmet dog food?” (That was a funnier question in 1980 than today when the answer to any question about whether a new form of pampering dogs will find willing customers is: “Of course some people will pay.”)
The method is pervasive: In 2024, Harvard Business School sold nearly 17 million case studies to various business programs around the world.
Case studies are more or less journalism, a field that I both enjoy and practice.
One well-known case study that I have taught many times is “Rob Parson at Morgan Stanley.” The facts are simple enough to produce a lively classroom debate. Mr. Parson has delivered impressive results and is viewed as a star performer, but his abrasive and go-it-alone style has alienated people across the firm. In the classroom, students take the position of his manager, Paul Nasr, and decide whether to promote him, delay the promotion or push him out.
Nearly three decades after publication, it remains among H.B.S.’s most widely used cases, and the dilemma is enduring: Should results be rewarded even when the person producing them damages the culture around him? In class, students vote on Mr. Nasr’s options and often role-play the difficult conversation between him and Mr. Parson. The discussion can be dramatic, engaging and effective.
But my experience has shown that by asking students to inhabit Mr. Nasr’s role, the case study narrows their imaginations to the decision facing one senior manager. Deeper questions — like whether Mr. Parson is himself a product of investment-banking culture — are rarely raised. Mr. Parson becomes an individual problem, when the larger issue may be an industry that rewards rainmaking, hierarchy and masculine performance norms, then acts surprised when they cause conflict.
After all, what good have “masculine performance norms” ever done the world?
When the case method is used in medicine and law, it serves a different set of goals. Medical students work through detailed patient scenarios — symptoms, test results, histories and social and economic context. Law students read real court opinions, dissecting facts, arguments and judgments. In both fields, students are confronted by the messiness of reality, and the goal is to foster disciplined skepticism: ask what’s missing, challenge assumptions and test how an analysis could be wrong.
Medical schools and law schools are famous for inculcating the notion that doctors and lawyers ought to be paid less, right?
Occasionally, doctors and lawyers do come up with ways to save the public money at their own expense. In 1785, for example, real estate lawyer Thomas Jefferson wrote a brilliant bill that defined property west of the Appalachians in precise terms of latitude and longitude rather than old-fashioned “metes & bounds” (“the Jones-Smith property line runs from the Old Oak Tree to that boulder that looks like King George”) that generated so much business for 18th Century East Coast lawyers.
But … that’s not what law school is mostly about.
Business school cases operate on another logic, focused not on inquiry but on decision making. H.B.S.’s own overview of the method describes students imagining “themselves in the decision-maker’s role” and “taking decisive action.” The point is to practice acting like the person in charge — or, as George W. Bush, a graduate of Harvard Business School, put it, “the decider.”
Why would the world need anybody to make decisions?
By overestimating the importance of individual decision makers, the business school classroom avoids harder questions: Who made this person the legitimate protagonist? Whose knowledge is absent? Why are workers, regulators, communities, ecosystems or citizens rarely given equal standing?
Because the owners didn’t put them in charge?
Furthermore, edits that push the case narratives away from reality are often meant to make it “work” in a classroom.
In contrast, movies and TV shows always go out of their way to show you the full, boring, un-fun truth, like how Law & Order rigorously documented the statistical reality that Park Avenue co-ops are hives of murderers. …
Business schools’ success in placing their graduates in high-paying jobs boosts their rankings; high rankings attract more applicants and allow higher tuitions; and wealthy alumni fund new programs and buildings that elevate the school’s status. It is a self-reinforcing cycle — a flywheel, in M.B.A. parlance — that pulls money, attention and legitimacy away from the disciplines best equipped to question this logic: history, philosophy, sociology, political theory.
After all, what academic disciplines have a better 21st Century track record than those?
In contrast, my big complaint about business education is that …
Paywall here.
