When Wealth Pretends to Be Wise, the Academy Must Speak

There are moments in history when a civilisation does not collapse noisily, but drifts—slowly, comfortably—away from its moral bearings. We may be living through such a moment now. Wealth, greased by technology and performative spectacle, has briefly succeeded in presenting itself as wisdom. Influence now passes for insight; scale substitutes for substance; military might for righteous action; and speed is mistaken for progress.

Yet history teaches that when power outruns truth, correction becomes inevitable. The question is not whether a course correction will come, but from where.

It will not come from markets alone. Markets are efficient, not moral. They optimise for profit, not for justice, coherence, or long-term human flourishing. Nor will correction reliably come from politics, which increasingly mirrors the incentives and distortions of wealth itself. When money learns to speak fluently in the language, the argot, of policy, politics becomes reactive rather than principled.

The most credible hope for repair lies elsewhere: in the academy (the disciplined pursuit of truth across society, not merely universities).

At its best—never perfect, often contested, sometimes slow—the academy is civilisation’s conscience with footnotes. It is one of the few remaining spaces structurally committed to the pursuit of truth even when truth is insipid, inconvenient, unprofitable, or unfashionable. Its central ethic is not applause but accuracy; not power but proof; not dominance but dialogue.

This is precisely where a growing misconception must be addressed.

In recent decades, business schools—B-schools—have come to be spoken of, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, as the primary training grounds for society’s “leaders.” This assumption deserves careful scrutiny. Business schools are highly effective at what they were designed to do: teaching finance, accounting, operations, strategy, logistics, and organisational optimisation. These are valuable skills. They are not, however, synonymous with moral leadership.

Management competence is not the same as wisdom. Strategy is not ethics. And maximising shareholder value is not equivalent to maximising human good or socio-ecological welfare.

When business schools drift into presenting technical proficiency as moral authority, a quiet but consequential confusion sets in. Graduates may leave fluent in case studies yet underexposed to history’s warnings; adept at optimisation yet insufficiently trained in restraint; confident in models yet thinly grounded in values. This is not a failure of intelligence—it is a failure of formation.

By contrast, the wider academy—across philosophy, history, the sciences, the humanities, law, and social inquiry—exists to interrogate first principles. It asks not only How can this be done? but Should it be done? At what cost? To whom? And with what long-term consequences? These questions rarely feature on balance sheets, yet they determine whether societies endure or unravel.

Crucially, the academy understands something wealth—and sometimes B-schools—are tempted to forget: that value is not synonymous with price. Human dignity cannot be monetised without loss. Ecological systems cannot be externalised indefinitely. Knowledge divorced from ethics becomes cleverness, not wisdom. The academy—at its best—holds these distinctions steady when society is tempted to blur them.

This does not require hostility toward business education. On the contrary, business schools function best when re-embedded within the moral and intellectual ecosystem of the university—when finance is taught alongside ethics, strategy alongside history, innovation alongside responsibility. Leadership worthy of the name emerges not from spreadsheets alone, but from disciplined moral imagination.

Repairing the world order does not mean restoring some imagined golden age. It means recalibrating our collective compass: re-centering truth over traction, responsibility over reach, and long-term consequence over short-term gain. These recalibrations are slow work. They require patience, humility, and the willingness to review and revise one’s own assumptions—habits deeply ingrained in serious scholarship.

The academy also performs another quiet but essential function: formation. It does not merely produce research; it shapes minds. In classrooms, laboratories, libraries, and seminars, young people learn how to think rather than what to shout. They learn to sit with complexity, to tolerate uncertainty, and to distinguish disagreement from disrespect. In a polarised world, these are not academic luxuries; they are civic necessities.

Of course, the academy itself must remain self-critical---even painfully so. When it chases prestige over purpose, metrics over meaning, or funding over frankness, it risks becoming another servant of the very disorder it should interrogate. Its moral authority rests precisely on its willingness to resist such capture—including capture by wealth, rankings, and managerial whim or fashion.

Still, when wealth pretends to be wise, the academy remains humanity’s most credible counter-voice—not because it is louder, but because it is truer. Civilisations endure not by the brilliance of their elites, but by the integrity of their truth-telling institutions.

Course corrections are indeed vital. And if the world is to repair itself without tearing further apart, it will be scholars, teachers, and students—armed not with slogans but with disciplined thought and moral seriousness—who quietly help us find our way back to our planet earth.

by Dennis A Minott, PhD