Re-Thinking the Composition of the Business School Faculty

Abstract

Since the 1990s, the faculty of U.S. colleges and universities has shifted from a workforce dominated by full-time tenured and tenure-track positions to one in which contingent appointments predominate. According to the American Association of University Professors, contingent faculty grew from about 47 percent of the national workforce in 1987 to roughly two-thirds by 2021 (AAUP, 2023). Business schools faced the same pressures, including cost constraints, a shortage of doctorally qualified faculty, ranking competition, and revised accreditation standards, but they responded differently. Drawing on two decades of faculty data from 180 AACSB-accredited business schools and a subsample of 54 schools at AAU institutions, this paper finds that business schools retained a substantially larger tenured core than higher education as a whole. By 2021-2022, non-tenured faculty accounted for about 26 percent of the total in the full sample and about 36 percent at the research-intensive AAU schools, while taking on growing roles in governance, curriculum, and industry engagement. We argue that the resulting portfolio of tenured, tenure-track, clinical, and lecturer faculty is a deliberate strategic response to market and accreditation forces. Tenured faculty sustain research, doctoral education, and leadership; clinical and applied-research faculty bridge academia and industry and anchor experiential learning. Managed deliberately, this balance strengthens business education rather than signaling its decline.