The Tenured Anachronism — The People Teaching the Future of Business Are Stuck in Its Past

Business school faculty are incentivised to publish peer-reviewed research that takes four years to appear in print. Their students need to govern AI deployments that are changing quarterly. That gap is not accidental. It is institutional.

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Somewhere in South Africa right now, a business school professor is preparing a lecture on strategy. The frameworks are well-established — Porter’s Five Forces, the balanced scorecard, and stakeholder theory. The slides have been updated since they were first created, in the sense that the font is different and some of the examples have been refreshed. The underlying content reflects a management environment that existed some years ago, taught by someone whose last sustained experience of a live corporate environment — navigating a real budget, managing a real workforce restructuring, being accountable for a real outcome — may have preceded the lecture by a decade or more.

The executive sitting in that classroom is paying premium tuition for knowledge that will help them lead an organisation through AI-driven transformation, regulatory change, and workforce disruption that is moving faster than any previous period in business history. The knowledge in the room does not match the problem they will return to on Monday morning. And the system that produced that mismatch was not designed by accident.

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

The argument that business school faculty have lost touch with corporate reality is not new. Warren Bennis and James O’Toole named it in the Harvard Business Review in 2005 — business schools are hiring professors with limited real-world experience and graduating students ill-equipped to wrestle with complex, unquantifiable issues — the actual stuff of management. That article is now twenty-one years old. The problem it described has not been solved. It has been compounded by two decades of unchanged incentive architecture applied to a business environment that has changed beyond recognition.

In March 2026, UNESCO issued a formal warning to business schools globally: reinvent or become irrelevant. The world’s foremost educational authority, drawing on consultation with thousands of higher education leaders, stated that the belief that business as usual is no longer viable was front and centre in its global assessment. Business schools have spent decades perfecting a formula — optimising rankings, maximising salaries, feeding talent pipelines for consulting and finance. UNESCO called time on that model. Its global roadmap demands leaders who can navigate systems, not functions — a direct challenge to the siloed, discipline-by-discipline structure that most business school curricula still reflect.

The mechanism that produces faculty disconnect is specific and well-documented. Academic tenure, promotion, and institutional ranking depend almost entirely on publication in the Financial Times 50 — the list of elite peer-reviewed journals whose citation records determine where a business school sits in the global rankings that determine its applications, its tuition power, and its accreditation standing. A professor’s career advancement bears no relationship to whether their students succeed in the corporate world. It bears a direct and measurable relationship to how many papers they publish in journals whose audience is a closed loop of academic peers. The result is an elaborate system that measures everything except what matters — a phrase the European Foundation for Management Development used in its own assessment of the ranking and accreditation architecture that sustains this incentive model.

The peer review process for an elite business journal takes between two and four years from submission to publication. This means that a professor writing about corporate AI adoption today — if their paper is accepted, which is far from certain — will see it published in 2029 or 2030. The paper will describe a corporate reality that will have been superseded multiple times before the journal reaches its subscribers. The system does not produce faculty who understand the business environment of 2026. By structural design, it produces faculty who study the business environment of several years ago — a disconnect that directly mirrors the broader erosion of long-form degree value currently being recorded across global trade and employment indices.

A 2025 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the longstanding publish-or-perish culture in academia actively hinders scientific progress and knowledge sharing, arguing that current incentive structures in academic publishing are fundamentally misaligned with the actual production and dissemination of useful knowledge. The effects of publish-or-perish pressure on management faculty specifically include heightened stress levels, the marginalisation of teaching, and research that lacks relevance to practitioners — findings consistent across multiple surveys of faculty in AACSB-accredited US business schools.

The South African regulatory framework acknowledges the problem and requires a response to it. The Council on Higher Education explicitly requires that MBA faculty maintain business links and engage in company projects. That requirement exists in the accreditation framework for every South African business school. The gap between the requirement’s existence and its enforcement is the most important South African-specific data point in this conversation — because it means the architecture for a solution already exists and is simply not being applied with the rigour that the paying student deserves.

INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS

The faculty disconnect problem is most precisely described not as a management failure but as a principal-agent failure. The faculty member’s interests — tenure security, research output, publication record, academic standing — have systematically diverged from the interests of the student who is paying for the degree. The faculty member is rationally pursuing the outcomes the system rewards. The student is paying for outcomes the system was not designed to produce. Neither party is acting irrationally. The institution is misaligned.

The standard path to a business school professorship makes this misalignment structural rather than incidental. The conventional academic career runs from an undergraduate degree directly to a Master’s programme, then to a PhD, and immediately into the classroom as an assistant professor. Many business school faculty have never spent a sustained period inside a modern corporate environment, have never navigated a regulatory audit with professional consequences for failure, have never managed a workforce through an AI-driven restructuring, have never been in the room when an AI deployment failed in production and had to explain to a board why it happened and what would be done about it.

Professor Jerry Wind of the Wharton School put it bluntly in a November 2025 interview: “Many of the faculty have no real-world experience. Some are only a chapter ahead of the students in a given area, if it’s not their area of research.” He went further, noting that even case studies fail to bridge the gap — a case written a year or two ago may not be applicable anymore — and identifying the widening gulf between academic research and industry innovation as perhaps the most troubling dimension of the problem: “A lot of the real advances happening today in management are led by industry, especially the research labs of the large technology companies,”

I have previously written about the production scars argument in the context of the corporate AI training market — the difference between trainers who understand AI and trainers who have implemented it, and the specific gap between credential and capability that emerges when learning is divorced from consequence. The business school faculty problem is the same argument at greater scale, longer duration, and with a more consequential effect on the people who depend on the knowledge being transmitted. The professor who can explain a concept, cite the relevant literature, and situate the idea within an established theoretical framework is doing something genuinely valuable. The professor who can also describe what happens when that concept meets a real organisation under pressure — what breaks, what holds, what the literature missed — is doing something qualitatively different. The system currently has no mechanism to distinguish between them or to value the second kind of knowledge over the first.

Poets and Quants described this failure precisely in a May 2025 analysis: abstract over impact, where the pursuit of academic prestige still drives faculty incentives at most institutions, research that gains academic citations frequently bears little relevance to practitioners, while teaching receives polite acknowledgment and publication in abstruse journals remains the primary path to tenure and influence. The same analysis identified a persistent pattern of isolation from reality — faculty members with limited practitioner experience teaching theoretical frameworks that may not survive first contact with organisational complexity.

The AACSB’s January 2026 framework report — drawing on evidence from 48 business schools across its global network — found that while AI in business education has shifted from experimentation to implementation, sustained faculty development remains one of the most significant gaps: only 12 per cent of schools mandate AI training for their faculty, despite clear demand from students and employers for hands-on applications and ethical guidelines.

The AACSB’s GenAI Adoption report, published in 2025 confirmed that while 64 per cent of faculty have used generative AI in teaching, it remains a supplementary tool rather than a core part of most faculty workflows — a reflection of the absence of structured faculty development requirements. A further AACSB survey of deans and faculty found that nearly 45 per cent of business schools lack the necessary coordinated governance to translate their AI policies into practice.

Because research is what gets rewarded, teaching is demoted. Developing a cutting-edge course on generative AI governance or algorithmic risk management takes hundreds of hours of unrewarded professional labour. The tenured professor who delivers the same strategy lecture in 2026 that they delivered in 2016 is not failing their institution’s formal requirements. They are meeting them. The students who cannot tell the difference are paying the price of that compliance.

Poets and Quants for Executives identified the survival requirement precisely in a November 2024 analysis: the schools that will survive are those that invest in faculty excellence, relentlessly update curricula to stay ahead of emerging trends, and craft immersive, real-world experiences that equip students to navigate the complexities of a globalised economy. AACSB’s December 2025 report on transforming business schools for the digital age found that students increasingly question the value of traditional degrees, while employers grow more vocal about graduate preparedness gaps — confirming that the faculty disconnect problem is now visible and measurable from both sides of the transaction.

AACSB’s proposed 2026 Global Standards represent one of the most consequential shifts in business education accreditation in recent years. The introduction of Standard 4.3 on Digital Agility signals that AI literacy, data-informed decision-making, and digital collaboration are no longer optional areas of innovation — they are emerging as accreditation expectations that will shape curriculum strategy, assessment practices, and faculty development priorities across institutions globally.

IMPLICATIONS

The implications of the tenured anachronism problem are specific and different for three audiences.

For governing councils and boards of South African business schools, the faculty disconnect is a governance accountability question that sits directly within King IV’s Principle 12 obligations. The same fiduciary duty to ensure technology governance aligns with risk management and organisational capability that applies to an organisation’s AI strategy applies to a business school’s faculty model. A governing council that approves the continued employment of faculty who have not meaningfully engaged with the corporate environment their students will enter is making a capital allocation decision — and it is a decision that the council is not currently required to formally justify against the outcomes it produces. The specific South African CHE requirement that faculty maintain business links and engage in company projects provides the governing council with both the authority and the existing regulatory mandate to require current corporate engagement. The question of why that mandate is not being enforced as a condition of continued faculty appointment — rather than as a nominal accreditation checkbox — is the question that governing councils should be asking their deans. The dean who cannot answer it has a staffing strategy that is not aligned with the institution’s regulatory obligations.

For business school deans and academic leaders, the most important structural reform available is the 50/50 embedded faculty model — a requirement that faculty spend half their professional time embedded in active corporate environments and half translating those current, consequence-laden experiences into curriculum and research. This is not a novel idea. Law schools require practising attorneys on their faculty. Medical schools require clinical practice alongside academic teaching. The business of 2026 is at least as complex, as consequential, and as rapidly changing as medicine or law. The faculty model should reflect that. AACSB’s own framework identifies sustained faculty development as a distinguishing characteristic of institutions making meaningful progress on AI integration — and sustained development requires structural incentives, not voluntary participation.

For the executive considering a South African business school programme, the faculty question is the most important due diligence question that most prospective students never ask. Not what is in the curriculum. Not which institution has the higher ranking. But who is teaching the course, what they have built, what they have failed at, and when they last held professional accountability for a real business outcome in the environment that the course claims to prepare you for. A professor who can answer those questions with specificity and recent dates is teaching from production scars. One who cannot is teaching from the literature. Both have value. Only one is worth the premium that executive education charges for current and applicable knowledge.

CLOSING TAKEAWAY

The business school faculty problem has been named in the literature for twenty-one years. UNESCO named it again in 2026. AACSB’s own data confirms it. The EFMD has described the ranking system that produces it as measuring everything except what matters. The fact that it remains unresolved is not evidence that it is unsolvable. It is evidence that the institutions responsible for solving it have not been sufficiently accountable to the people who pay the price of it.

The tenured anachronism is not a criticism of the individuals who hold tenured business school positions. Most of them are intelligent, dedicated, and producing genuinely rigorous academic work within the system they were hired to operate in. It is a criticism of the system itself — the incentive architecture, the accreditation framework, the ranking metrics, and the governing council accountability that together produce faculty whose professional success is entirely disconnected from the practical relevance of what they teach.

The AI era has made that disconnection more consequential than it has ever been before. The gap between a lecture on AI governance written from the literature and a lecture on AI governance written from the experience of having governed an AI deployment and watched it fail is the gap between knowing that a problem exists and knowing what it actually looks like when it arrives. The executives who are paying for business education in 2026 deserve the second kind of knowledge. Most of them are not receiving it. And the institutions responsible for that gap have governing councils who have not yet been asked to formally account for it.

Johan Steyn is a prominent AI thought leader, speaker, and author with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence’s impact on business and society. He is passionate about ethical AI development and its role in shaping a better future. Find out more about Johan’s work at https://www.aiforbusiness.net