Business Schools: Time to Cancel your AACSB Accreditations!

Since the business school accreditation agency AACSB has recently renounced Diversity, Equity and Inclusive (DEI), it is high time that AACSB accredited business schools renounce their accreditations.

Accreditations are questionable in themselves. Expensive, lots of bureaucracy, hardly any noticeable improvements for students or lecturers. Not much substance, mostly a legitimacy facade. I’ve always found cheers about multiple accreditations absurd.

But when global accreditation of business schools immediately abandons DEI standards in anticipatory submission to an authoritarian US president announcing legally questionable decrees, then all the talk of “academic research principles” (p. 57 in the “Guiding Principles and Standards for Business School Accrediation”) is exactly that: just talk.

And when the adoption of diversity, equity and inclusion is also introduced with the words “In the spirit of continuous improvement”, it makes things even worse. One could say, it adds insult to injury.

Finally, when the decision is justified by the fact that “DEI had become ‘politicized’”, then this is proof that AACSB has obviously never understood the inherently political nature of standards for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Let me conclude with a practical proposal: AACSB-accredited universities in Europe should better invest their annual AACSB membership fee of USD 7,140 and the much higher expenses for regular re-accreditation procedures into hosting US-based DEI researchers being persecuted overseas.

(leonhard)