'[...C]ontemporary business schools increasingly see themselves as business organizations, not educational institutions. Over the past decade, the apparent dominance of market logic in how business educators think about their enterprise has become evident in their discourse. Business schools make a “value proposition” to students, who are now commonly described as “customers.”

A 2002 ... report titled “Management Education at Risk,” heavily laced with business jargon, described the increased “segmentation of consumer markets” for business education and explored its implications for “strategies to deliver educational and research services” on the part of business schools. Nowhere in this report, authored by a committee consisting mostly of business educators, was there any discussion of education as a mission, management as a profession, or the risk to the integrity of university business schools from an uncritical adoption of a commercial self-conception. This view has become part of the institutional character of business schools and indeed, as many have recently argued, of the American university itself.

While administrators at the elite business schools undoubtedly cringe at the notion that diplomas are merely market products, signals for employers, and induct students into elite networks, a cursory examination of business school Web sites and marketing material will highlight that the same administrators have nevertheless continued to promote their schools as a means of access to benefits clearly ancillary to education, in particular a valuable credential associated with a high “return on investment” and access to elite networks.

One reason that business school deans and administrators may have been reluctant to face up to the reality of the changes unfolding before their eyes is that these changes, examined closely, can be seen to carry implications that severely undermine the intellectual and social foundations of the university-based business school itself, calling its very reason for continued existence into question.

The ideas of shareholder primacy and managers as the agents of shareholders, which now is the staple of most M.B.A. curriculums, stripped the occupation of management of any last vestiges of professional identity, self-respect, or responsibility that had been attached to it through the efforts of business school founders, leaders, and faculty going back over a century to the birth of the university business school itself.

This raised the question, among others, of whether business schools were actually “professional schools” if business management itself was indeed not actually a profession. And if they were not — if, instead, business schools were highly sophisticated trade schools that existed to prepare students, by and large, for careers dedicated to the sole purpose of creating private wealth, for themselves as “agents” as well as for shareholders as “principals” — another question that arose was whether business schools remained aligned with the mission of the university to preserve, create, and transmit knowledge to advance the public good.'