Should We Give Business School Students What They Want or What They Need?

Universities are the world’s longest-standing (and thus, arguably highly valued and flexible) organizations. Frank Donoghue in The Last Professors notes a Carnegie Foundation finding that only 66 institutions have operated continuously since 1530: in addition to the Icelandic and Isle of Man Parliaments, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Lutheran Church, 62 of these were universities. Thanks to their ability to adapt to social changes, some of the world’s most prestigious universities in Bologna, Oxford, and Paris have been operating successfully since the 11th and 12th centuries. While the history of university-based business schools is much shorter, the oldest of them have been around for 150 years