AACSB’s failures in guarding the ethical henhouse of business schools

Abstract

This essay is written to provoke a reaction against the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. When a business school’s administration is criminally convicted of conspiracy to commit fraud and yet it retains its accreditations, something is wrong. Accreditors expect that we enforce ethical standards like “no cheating” on our students but do not enforce those standards on deans, even in cases of publicly-admitted years-long submissions of misrepresentative rankings data. That inconsistency is not lost on us, given the explicit statements such accreditors have about quality, social responsibility, and serving students—all of which are violated in their inactions when their paying members (or their graduates) are involved in harmful behaviors. Management learning is negatively affected as a result; whatever we state in the classroom about ethics is effectively drowned out by what standards are actually enforced in the real world by those who claim to provide legitimacy to our programs and give us a license to operate. So, it is time to address that. An implementable solution is proposed, one which if not adopted should lead to serious consideration of the dissolution of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business and any other accreditor who fails to provide the public service expected of it.