What a difference a year makes. On April 8 2008 Harvard Business School trumpeted 100 triumphant years of the MBA. A year later it published an introspective case study questioning its role and the Harvard Business Review began an online debate – How to Fix Business Schools.

Harvard is not alone in this volte-face, tacitly acknowledging that something is broken in the world of management education. At a recent meeting of the AACSB, the US business school accreditation body, many US professors were heard to claim they had really been socialists all along. One participant described the meeting as “l(fā)ike a therapy session for US deans”.

Views on the culpability of schools in the economic meltdown range from one extreme to another, as do the prescriptions for how to win back the trust of business and students.