Managerialism and academic snobbery are eroding the soul
of hospitality education, but it’s not too late to reclaim its purpose.
For decades, hospitality
education was one of higher education’s great success stories. The UK once led
Europe in developing postgraduate hospitality management programs that were
academically rigorous yet deeply rooted in the realities of service and leadership.
Today, however, this proud tradition is under threat, not from waning student
interest or lack of industry relevance, but from within the academy itself. Two
intertwined forces, managerialism and academic subject snobbery, are steadily
eroding the humanistic, experiential-based ethos that once defined our
discipline.
The Corporate Creep of the
University
The contemporary university has
become a laboratory for corporate logic. Once collegial spaces of scholarship,
business schools are now driven by the metrics of performance dashboards,
publication counts, student satisfaction scores, and “value-for-money”
indicators. This ideology of managerialism reduces academic leadership to
spreadsheet oversight. In the process, educators are transformed into
compliance officers whose success is measured by outputs rather than
educational impact.
For hospitality educators, this
shift is especially corrosive. The heart of our discipline lies in people,
service, and experience, qualities that resist quantification. Yet hospitality
programmes housed within business schools are pressured to mimic corporate
management models, stripping away experiential components like training
restaurants and live-learning environments because they are “inefficient.” The
result? Curricula that look more like generic business degrees than the
applied, people-focused programs our industry desperately needs.
The Persistent Hierarchy of
Knowledge
Layered atop this managerial
obsession is an equally insidious cultural bias: academic subject snobbery. In
many institutions, hospitality remains seen as “soft”, vocational and
operational, somehow less intellectual than its counterparts in finance or economics.
This prejudice, long embedded in university hierarchies, continues to shape
funding decisions, staffing priorities, and promotion pathways.
Scholars who engage with
real-world industry challenges or use applied research methods are often
sidelined in favour of those who produce abstract theory destined for ranked
journals. The irony is striking: educators with decades of leadership and
practical experience, those best equipped to mentor future hospitality
professionals, are marginalised by academic systems that prize citation metrics
over pedagogical excellence. The result is a discipline dislocated from its
roots and a generation of graduates less prepared for the complexities of the
service economy.
Reclaiming Hospitality’s
Identity
Yet all is not lost. Across the
UK and Europe, there remain small but inspiring examples of programs that
resist these trends, ones that still honour the blend of rigour and relevance,
integrating theory with practice and maintaining close ties with the industry
they serve. These “fortresses” remind us of what hospitality education can and
should be: inclusive, experiential, and unapologetically human.
If universities are serious about
nurturing future leaders who understand service excellence, ethics, and care,
they must move beyond the sterile metrics of managerialism and dismantle the
hierarchies that devalue applied knowledge. Reviving dedicated hotel schools,
re-empowering hospitality departments, and recognising practice-based
scholarship are not nostalgic gestures, they are essential acts of renewal.
Hospitality education does not
need to apologise for being practical. It needs to be proud, and to assert once
again that knowledge rooted in experience is every bit as valuable as knowledge
derived from theory.
Read the original critical review
papers (open access) here:
Paper 1: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhlste.2025.100581
Paper 2: https://doi.org/10.1080/10963758.2025.2578541
About the Authors
Dr. Charalampos (Babis)
Giousmpasoglou is a Principal Academic in HRM and Programme Leader in MSc
International Hospitality Management at Bournemouth University.
Prof. Ioannis Pantelidis is
a Professor of Hospitality and Tourism Management and the Head of The
Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management at Ulster University.