💡 TL;DR：一位剑桥商学院教授的激进观点：商学院没教会学生应对真实商业世界，与其修补，不如关掉。附英文原文。

I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down.

作者：Chris Marquis（Christopher Marquis），剑桥大学贾奇商学院教授，《The Profiteers》作者 发表：《纽约时报》观点版 Guest Essay，2026-10-18 链接：https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/18/opinion/business-school-mba-harvard-cornell-cambridge.html 插图：Ed Steed 备注：英文原文（据公开转载全文）+ 中文全文翻译。

---

原文

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 have taught in business schools for over 20 years, at Harvard, Cornell and Cambridge. While some students appear to care only about their future compensation, I have met many with nobler goals: engineers who want to commercialize clean energy, physicians determined to fix the health care system, nonprofit leaders who have watched good missions fail for want of good management.

These students enroll hoping to learn what business schools say they teach: how to manage people, how to allocate capital and resources and how to make the world a better place through leadership. But I’ve come to see how the institution can reshape the worldviews of those who enter it, often undermining the very ambitions that brought them there.

This change can take place in a single semester. Again and again, I have watched students abandon their altruistic intentions, instead becoming consumed by whether to choose careers in consulting or finance and who will land a summer internship at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs.

The modern business school is designed to promote dealmaking, simplification and optimization. This mind-set has escaped containment and has spread to the wider world. Business-educated elites increasingly populate political leadership, bringing with them a transactional view of public life. One investigation found that out of 45 current heads of state who had studied in the United States, 10 were business majors, and six of those also earned M.B.A.s. President Trump, a Wharton undergraduate, has treated foreign policy and government itself as extensions of deal making and personal gain.

Surely, not every business graduate governs this way. But recent research by the Nobel laureate economist Daron Acemoglu and colleagues shows what tends to happen when you put an M.B.A. in charge. In both the United States and Denmark, firms that appointed managers with business degrees cut wages and reduced labor’s share of income. Yet these companies didn’t become more productive, nor did they grow sales, investment or employment any faster. What registers as managerial acumen turns out to be wealth transfer — value moved away from workers and toward profits, shareholders and executives.

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”.

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. The method is pervasive: In 2024, Harvard Business School sold nearly 17 million case studies to various business programs around the world.

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.

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.

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”.

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?

I wrote dozens of case studies during my decade at H.B.S., some of which are described as classics and best sellers. These are not products of independent research, but carefully packaged corporate narratives. The disclaimer printed in tiny type on every H.B.S. case concedes this point: Cases “are not intended to serve … as sources of primary data”. The data they include can be selective, biased or even fabricated.

For the many cases I wrote under the guidance of senior faculty members, events that reflected poorly on the company were softened or omitted and the roles of certain executives were burnished. The companies held final approval, with drafts reviewed by their lawyers and P.R. staff. Rather than being vehicles for disinterested learning, as one might expect at a university, the case studies end up as instruments of reputation management.

Corporate influence feeds a larger problem: The cases almost always feature winners, making it easy to mistake luck or timing for a proven strategy. Failures, dead ends and nonmarket solutions are rarely considered. Before Enron’s fraud was exposed, its business model was presented in admiring terms by at least five H.B.S. case studies. More damning still, the strategies that later led to its collapse — its asset-light model, its trading platform — were portrayed as innovations. Questions about deregulated energy markets, revolving-door oversight and opaque accounting went unasked.

Furthermore, edits that push the case narratives away from reality are often meant to make it “work” in a classroom. Complexity is systematically shaved away, and dissenting voices often go unheard. Real organizations don’t move in clearly delineated phases toward a decision point, but business school teaching materials often do — compressing timelines, dropping messy subplots and smoothing over contradictions to produce clean narrative arcs and satisfying problems to debate.

The result is a curriculum built around false narratives. Some of the most celebrated ideas in management have not been the ones that survived peer review or replication, but the ones that could be turned into TED Talks, consulting frameworks or airport best sellers. Faculty members are rewarded not for knowledge but for performance — selling a big idea with a memorable label that promises “success” or “disruption”.

Business schools have a divided mission: They seek to legitimize an economic system focused on private gain while also developing guardrails to tame it. They found a remarkable way to manage this tension: the “win-win” story in which the conflict between private gain and public good simply evaporates.

A classic win-win is the contention that environmental programs like reducing waste or using LED lights can save money or that decent pay and benefits lower costs by reducing employee turnover. Business schools now claim to educate “leaders who make a difference in the world”, as H.B.S. proclaims in its mission, while Wharton pursues a “quest for positive global impact”.

These aspirations are built on the delusional but widely accepted idea of “stakeholder capitalism”: that companies can produce climate stability, fair wages, healthy communities and functioning democracies while also delivering profits. Executives promise that technology will solve our environmental problems; voluntary measurement systems are offered as appropriate alternatives to public accountability; ethics is rebranded as competitive advantage rather than moral obligation.

During the 2010s, stakeholder capitalism was quickly woven into M.B.A. syllabuses. But when researchers examined whether the corporations that signed on to a statement pledging commitment to this ethos actually changed their behavior on wages, investment, governance or climate, they found little evidence of a shift. The statement was less a new doctrine than an effort at reputation management — and a ploy to avoid oversight.

Recent evidence shows that many foundational studies supporting the win-win idea were based on flawed data or couldn’t be replicated. Yet faculty members keep researching, writing about and teaching the topic — suggesting an ideological project more than an academic exercise.

Much of what has happened in business schools turned out to be the leading edge of a broader transformation: the corporatization of the university itself. Institutions now chase rankings, donors and corporate partnerships, tout their contributions to innovation and growth and treat everything else as overhead. Students are “customers”, and the degrees are “products” with greater and lesser “market shares”. University strategic documents talk about “brand positioning” for departments and “R.O.I.s” on tenure lines.

Once you accept this frame, it becomes hard to defend the existence of a philosophy seminar or a history department for any reason other than the revenue it generates. The hiring of non-tenure-track adjunct professors follows: If education is “content” delivered to fee-paying “customers”, why keep full-time scholars on the payroll when you can hire contingent, low-wage instructors?

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.

The university’s capacity to cultivate historical memory, moral judgment and democratic imagination is weakened, even as its capacity to churn out data analysts, financial engineers and “innovation” managers grows. The irony — and danger — is that in the age of A.I., the thinking fostered in the arts and humanities is increasingly urgent. The domination of business schools is not only physical and financial; it is intellectual, and it is crowding out liberal education.

I’ve come to a grim conclusion: The problem with business schools is not repairable misalignment but the design itself. Business schools are not malfunctioning institutions; they are highly efficient machines doing exactly what they were designed to do. An ethics elective here, a sustainability center there, a “responsible leadership” badge — they all serve to legitimize the machine, not change its output.

The most honest solution I’ve come across is to replace the category entirely. Stuart Hart, an emeritus professor at Cornell and an early sustainability champion, told me he reached that conclusion after trying every internal route to make M.B.A. curriculums more responsible. The institution itself was the problem. At the University of Vermont, Dr. Hart has since developed a new form of business degree focused on societal impact — a small but concrete test of the case for starting over. In this program, sustainability is not a lone elective but run through the whole curriculum, and students spend the summer embedded in a mission-driven company.

What would that clean-sheet logic mean across an entire university? One starting point is the organization theorist Martin Parker’s call to create “schools for organizing” rather than schools for business, centered on how humans coordinate for shared ends. Students would study co-ops, unions and social movements alongside the shareholder corporation. The central question would shift from “How do we maximize shareholder value?” to “How do different forms of organization distribute power, risk and reward — and which should we strengthen?”

Dismantling the business school as a single high-status silo that professionalizes private gain may seem a heavy lift. But universities can create cross-disciplinary pathways for students who want to work in business without submitting them to the business school worldview. Some already offer “business and society” majors or master’s programs in organizations and public purpose, drawing on sociology, law and public policy. The point would not be to abolish the study of markets, but to return it to settings where questions of power, history, democracy and ecological limits cannot be so easily avoided.

For most of my career, I’ve taught electives focused on responsible business and sustainability — gratifying work, but largely preaching to the converted. Recently, at Cambridge, I introduced a required sustainability course filled with future bankers, consultants and tech executives who once would have steered clear.

Many arrive deeply skeptical, convinced that any time a corporation acts in a responsible way it must be a marketing ploy; some push back hard on ideas they see as threats to growth. But forcing them out of their bubbles into a shared conversation about the natural environment, inequality and discrimination has produced the kind of debate that is so often missing in education today.

This is not enough. One required course cannot redeem the business school model. If anything, teaching it has intensified my disappointment. The course is relegated to the very end of the program — a telling signal of its importance — and amid a growing backlash against sustainability, there is some pressure to reduce or eliminate the class, to appease the customers who now drive decisions in higher education.

Still, the experience has reminded me why abolishing business schools cannot mean abandoning the people in them. The goal is not to write off the students as aspiring selfish capitalists; it is to stop funneling them through a machine that narrows their sense of possibility. Many of my students arrive on campus wanting to work on the crises that our economic system has created. What they lack is an institution that is worthy of their better impulses.

---

中文全文

我在商学院教书。是时候关掉它们了。

今年秋天，又一批野心勃勃的年轻专业人士来到世界各地的商学院，读两年制项目，学费六位数。他们出现在校园里最漂亮、最光鲜的几栋楼里，这又带出那个熟悉的问题：MBA 到底是为了什么？

这个问题在过去几十年商学教育急剧扩张之后变得更紧迫。今天，将近五分之一的美国本科生主修商科，MBA 是美国最受欢迎的研究生学位。

我在商学院教了二十多年书，在哈佛、康奈尔和剑桥。有些学生似乎只关心未来的薪酬，但我遇到过很多有更高目标的人：想把清洁能源商业化的工程师，决心修好医疗系统的医生，眼睁睁看着好的使命因为管理不善而失败的非营利组织领导者。

这些学生入学时，想学的是商学院宣称自己教的东西：怎么管人，怎么配置资本和资源，怎么通过领导力让世界变得更好。但我渐渐看到，这个机构如何重塑走进它的人的世界观，而且常常瓦解的正是把他们带进来的那些抱负。

这种改变可以在一个学期内发生。一次又一次，我看着学生放弃利他的意图，转而满脑子想的是：去咨询还是去金融，谁能拿到麦肯锡或高盛的暑期实习。

现代商学院的设计目的，是促进交易、简化和优化。这种心态已经失控外溢，蔓延到更广阔的世界。受过商科教育的精英越来越多地进入政治领导层，把一种交易式的公共生活观带了进去。一项调查发现，在 45 位曾在美国留学过的现任国家元首中，10 位本科读的是商科，其中 6 位还拿了 MBA。特朗普总统是沃顿的本科生，他把外交政策乃至政府本身，都当作交易的延伸和个人获利的延伸。

当然，不是每个商科毕业生都这样治理。但诺贝尔经济学奖得主达龙·阿西莫格鲁及其同事最近的研究，展示了把 MBA 放到掌权位置上通常会发生什么。在美国和丹麦，任命有商科学位的管理者的公司，压低了工资，削减了劳动收入份额。但这些公司并没有变得更高产，销售、投资或就业也没有增长得更快。所谓的管理才干，到头来是财富转移——价值从劳动者手里，转向利润、股东和高管。

我逐渐意识到，商学院不只是反映我们的经济体系——它们主动生产这个体系的优先级，把它的伤害正常化，训练出未来的领导者，而这些领导者将设计并捍卫那些驱动我们多重全球危机的结构。在边缘上修修补补，开一门企业责任或商业伦理课，没有用。我们不需要“修好”商学院。我们需要废除它们。

商学院一直难以证明自己在大学里的位置。医学院的核心正当性是健康，法学院的核心正当性是正义——这些都是无可争议的公共利益。商学院的组织架构则明确围绕一种私人利益：追求利润。美国社会学家托斯丹·凡勃伦一个世纪前就指出了这个张力，批评大学里以商业为中心的学院，因为它们“不必意味着对公共利益有任何服务性”。

当沃顿和哈佛商学院这样的学校建立时，它们被视为过于职业化；为了建立合法性，创办者把管理包装成一门专业，与法律和医学平起平坐。但那些领域的教育建立在成熟的知识体系之上——数百年的判例法、生物学等自然科学——而管理学恰恰缺乏这些。

解决方案是哈佛院长华莱士·多纳姆在 1920 年代想出来的：借用法律和医学的教学方式——案例。它成了商学教育的标志性方法。直到今天，教授们仍然布置 10 到 20 页的商业挑战描述，最后落在一个决策点上，让学生在课堂上辩论。这个方法无处不在：2024 年，哈佛商学院向世界各地的商业项目卖出了近 1700 万份案例。

我教过很多次的一个著名案例是《摩根士丹利的罗布·帕森》。事实足够简单，能在课堂上激起热烈辩论。帕森先生业绩亮眼，被视为明星员工，但他粗暴、独来独往的风格，得罪了公司上下很多人。课堂上，学生站在他经理保罗·纳斯尔的位置上，决定是提拔他、推迟提拔，还是让他走人。

发表近三十年后，它仍然是哈佛商学院使用最广的案例之一，而那个两难也一直没变：结果该被奖励吗，哪怕产出结果的人正在破坏他周围的文化？课堂上，学生对纳斯尔的选项投票，常常角色扮演他和帕森之间那场艰难的谈话。讨论可以很戏剧化、很吸引人、很有效。

但我的经验是，让学生住进纳斯尔这个角色，案例就把他们的想象力收窄到一个高级管理者面前的这个决定。更深的问题——比如帕森本人是不是投资银行文化的产物——很少被提出来。帕森成了一个个体问题，而更大的问题可能是一个奖励“拉来大单”、等级制和男性化表现规范的行业，然后在这些东西引发冲突时表现得惊讶。

当案例教学法用在医学和法学里，它服务的是另一套目标。医学生处理详细的病人情境——症状、检验结果、病史，还有社会和经济背景。法学生读真实的法院意见，拆解事实、论证和判决。在这两个领域，学生面对的是现实的混乱，目标是培养有纪律的怀疑：问缺了什么，挑战假设，检验一个分析怎么会错。

商学院的案例按另一套逻辑运行，焦点不在探究，而在决策。哈佛商学院自己对这个方法的概述说，学生要想象“自己处在决策者的位置上”，并“采取果断行动”。要点是练习像负责人那样行事——或者，用哈佛商学院毕业生小布什的话说，“决策者”。

通过高估个体决策者的重要性，商学院的课堂避开了更难的问题：是谁把这个人变成了合法的主角？谁的知识缺席了？为什么工人、监管者、社区、生态系统或公民，很少被给予同等的地位？

我在哈佛商学院的十年里写了几十个案例，有些被称为经典和畅销案例。它们不是独立研究的产物，而是精心包装的企业叙事。每个哈佛案例上用蝇头小字印着的免责声明承认了这一点：案例“无意作为……一手数据的来源”。它们包含的数据可以是选择性的、有偏的，甚至是编造的。

我在资深教师指导下写的许多案例里，对公司不利的事件被软化或删掉，某些高管的作用被擦亮。公司拥有最终批准权，草稿由他们的律师和公关人员审阅。案例研究本该是大学里那种无私求知的载体，结果却成了声誉管理的工具。

企业的影响助长了一个更大的问题：案例几乎总是以赢家为主角，让人很容易把运气或时机误认为经过验证的战略。失败、死路、非市场的解决方案，很少被考虑。在安然造假被揭穿之前，它的商业模式至少被五个哈佛案例以赞赏的措辞呈现过。更糟的是，后来导致它崩溃的那些战略——轻资产模式、交易平台——被描绘成创新。关于放松管制的能源市场、旋转门式的监管、不透明的会计，这些问题都没有被问。

此外，那些把案例叙事推离现实的编辑，常常是为了让它在课堂上“成立”。复杂性被系统性地削掉，异见常常听不到。真实的组织不会沿着清晰划定的阶段走向一个决策点，但商学院的教学材料常常如此——压缩时间线，丢掉混乱的支线，抹平矛盾，以制造干净的故事弧和值得辩论的、令人满意的问题。

结果是，一套围绕虚假叙事建立的课程。管理学里一些最受推崇的思想，并不是经得起同行评审或重复验证的那些，而是能被做成 TED 演讲、咨询框架或机场畅销书的那些。教师得到的奖励不是知识，而是表演——用一个让人记住的标签推销一个大想法，许诺“成功”或“颠覆”。

商学院有一个分裂的使命：它们试图让一个以私人利益为中心的经济体系合法化，同时又要造出驯服它的护栏。它们找到了一个了不起的办法来管理这个张力：“双赢”的故事——私人利益和公共利益之间的冲突，就这样蒸发了。

一个经典的双赢，是主张环保项目——比如减少浪费或用 LED 灯——能省钱；或者主张体面的薪酬和福利能降低员工流动成本。商学院现在声称要培养“在世界上有所作为的领导者”，这是哈佛商学院的使命宣言；沃顿则追求“对全球产生积极影响”。

这些抱负建立在一个妄想却被广泛接受的观念上：“利益相关者资本主义”——公司可以在交付利润的同时，生产气候稳定、公平工资、健康社区和运转良好的民主。高管们承诺技术会解决我们的环境问题；自愿的测量体系被当作公共问责的合适替代；伦理被重新包装成竞争优势，而不是道德义务。

2010 年代，利益相关者资本主义被迅速织进 MBA 课程。但当研究者检验那些签署了承诺此理念的声明的公司，在工资、投资、治理或气候上是否真的改变了行为时，他们几乎找不到改变的证据。那份声明与其说是一种新教义，不如说是一次声誉管理——以及一个躲避监督的把戏。

最近的证据显示，许多支持“双赢”这一想法的基础研究，基于有缺陷的数据，或者无法重复。但教师们继续研究、写作、教授这个题目——这更像一个意识形态工程，而不是学术活动。

商学院里发生的很多事情，后来被证明是一场更大变革的先锋：大学本身的公司化。机构追逐排名、捐赠者和企业合作，吹嘘自己对创新和增长的贡献，把其他一切当作管理费用。学生是“客户”，学位是“产品”，有不同的“市场份额”。大学的战略文件谈部门的“品牌定位”，谈终身教职编制上的“投资回报率”。

一旦你接受这个框架，你就很难再用创收之外的任何理由，为一个哲学研讨班或一个历史系辩护。接着就是聘用非终身轨的兼职教授：如果教育是投递给付费“客户”的“内容”，为什么还要把全职学者留在工资单上，而不是雇临时的低薪讲师？

商学院成功把毕业生送进高薪工作，提升了排名；高排名吸引更多申请者，允许更高的学费；富有的校友资助新项目和新大楼，进一步提升学校的地位。这是一个自我强化的循环——用 MBA 的行话说，一个飞轮——它把钱、注意力和合法性，从那些最有能力质疑这套逻辑的学科那里抽走：历史、哲学、社会学、政治理论。

大学培养历史记忆、道德判断和民主想象力的能力被削弱，而它批量生产数据分析师、金融工程师和“创新”管理者的能力在增长。讽刺——也是危险——在于，在 AI 时代，人文和艺术所培养的思考正变得越来越紧迫。商学院的支配不只是物理和财务上的；它是智识上的，而且正在挤走博雅教育。

我得出一个冷酷的结论：商学院的问题不是可以修复的错位，而是设计本身。商学院不是失灵的制度；它们是高效运转的机器，正在精确执行它们被设计来做的事。这里一门伦理选修，那里一个可持续发展中心，一个“负责任领导力”徽章——它们都在为这台机器提供合法性，而不是改变它的产出。

我遇到的最诚实的解决方案，是把这个类别整个替换掉。康奈尔荣休教授、早期可持续发展倡导者斯图尔特·哈特告诉我，他是在试遍了所有让 MBA 课程更负责任的内部路径之后，才得出这个结论的。机构本身就是问题。哈特博士后来在佛蒙特大学开发了一种新的商科学位，聚焦社会影响——这是对“推倒重来”主张的一次小而具体的检验。在这个项目里，可持续发展不是一门孤立的选修，而是贯穿整个课程，学生要在夏天进入一家使命驱动的公司实习。

这种“从白纸开始”的逻辑，放到整所大学里意味着什么？一个起点是组织理论家马丁·帕克的呼吁：建立“组织学校”，而不是商学院，核心是人类如何为了共同目的而协调。学生将学习合作社、工会和社会运动，和股东公司并列。中心问题将从“我们如何最大化股东价值”，转向“不同形式的组织如何分配权力、风险和回报——我们应该加强哪一种？”

把商学院作为一个高地位的、把私人利益专业化的孤岛拆掉，听起来工程浩大。但大学可以为想进入商业、又不愿被商学院世界观收编的学生，建立跨学科的路径。有些学校已经提供“商业与社会”专业，或聚焦组织与公共目的的硕士项目，依托社会学、法律和公共政策。要点不是废除对市场的研究，而是把它放回那些权力、历史、民主和生态限制无法被轻易回避的场域。

我职业生涯的大部分时间，教的是负责任商业和可持续发展的选修课——工作令人满足，但很大程度上是只对已经信的人讲道。最近在剑桥，我开了一门必修的可持续发展课，学生里满是未来会去当银行家、咨询顾问和技术高管的人，这些人过去会绕开这门课。

很多人来时深怀怀疑，确信公司只要做出负责任的行为，一定是营销把戏；有些人对他们视为增长威胁的观念强烈反弹。但强迫他们走出自己的泡泡，进入一场关于自然环境、不平等和歧视的共同对话，产生了今天教育里常常缺失的那种辩论。

这还不够。一门必修课救不了商学院模式。真要说的话，教这门课让我更失望。这门课被安排在项目的最后——这本身就是一个说明其重要性的信号——而在对可持续发展的反弹日益增长的背景下，有人施压要缩减或取消这门课，以安抚那些如今在高等教育里驱动决策的“客户”。

不过，这段经历也提醒我，为什么废除商学院不能意味着抛弃里面的人。目标不是把学生当成一心想自私发财的人一笔勾销；而是停止把他们送进一台收窄他们可能性感的机器。我的很多学生来到校园时，想做的就是解决我们的经济体系制造出来的那些危机。他们缺的，是一个配得上他们更好冲动的机构。