Yeah he definitely was a bad professor. Sad that he was the finance professor (for this required, main track course) every undergrad my year had. Which meant, I think, 300-400 students received his indoctrination that semester. I use him as an example because that moment was so, well, exemplary. Other courses weren't as extreme, but they generally echoed the core tenet: your goal is "maximize profit" with sometimes an explicitly added "above all else". It generally gave me the impression that the corporate social responsibility club was the window dressing to this tenet--and the place in the business school for liberals to get out of the way and still fit in.
But to zoom out a second, in America, it's not just a "tenet", it's a legal responsibility of the CEO of a corporation to maximize shareholder value. The professor, and school, are preachers of something much larger than themselves, and so I don't want to point my finger so strongly at just this professor, and just this school.
> in America [...] it's a legal responsibility of the CEO of a corporation to maximize shareholder value.
This isn't actually true, or at least I've seen it disputed convincingly [0], though it is very widely believed. It's no surprise that you were explicitly taught it.
The problem was discussed several times across different courses for us. Essentially this is all based on Friedman's book Capitalism and Freedom, which says:
> There is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits
That is the basis for the argument your professor made. However, the passage in its entirety is:
> There is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.
Just curious are b-schools in the states still teaching with this ideology?
Here in South Africa this view is intially discussed but soon after the negative consequences of this view. Long term sustainability is a big focus area, specifically around the SDG.
But to zoom out a second, in America, it's not just a "tenet", it's a legal responsibility of the CEO of a corporation to maximize shareholder value. The professor, and school, are preachers of something much larger than themselves, and so I don't want to point my finger so strongly at just this professor, and just this school.