The more powerful the technology, the more important judgment becomes.
Knowledge generation has migrated from universities to tech giants like OpenAI and Google, threatening academia's traditional authority and intellectual independence. Esade is repositioning itself as an open 'garden' rather than an elite 'tower,' combining technical training with philosophy, history, and critical thinking to develop purpose-driven leaders.
- Esade educates 13,706 students annually, with 40% from outside Spain across 126 nationalities
- 2024-2025 revenue: 136.3 million euros; EBITDA: 15.3 million; profit: 6.8 million
- 5.4 million euros allocated annually to scholarships for 295 students, with coverage up to 100% tuition
- Founded in 1958 within Jesuit university network; Traça is first foreign director in school's history
Esade's new Portuguese director argues business schools must recover their critical role by emphasizing humanities and ethics as AI advances faster than academia, shifting knowledge production from universities to tech companies.
Daniel Traça arrived at Esade in 2024 with a diagnosis that sounds almost like heresy in the halls of a business school: universities have lost their monopoly on knowledge. The Portuguese economist, who previously led Nova SBE in Lisbon, took the helm of an institution that educates nearly 14,000 students annually—four out of every ten from outside Spain, representing 126 nationalities. But his concern wasn't about enrollment numbers. It was about relevance itself.
The problem, as Traça sees it, is structural and accelerating. For generations, universities were the crucible where ideas were tested, debated, and refined before entering the world. That role has shifted. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic—the technology companies now move faster than any campus, and more importantly, they've become the places where the most consequential debates happen. A Google engineer questioning the ethics of a military contract, an Anthropic researcher wrestling with AI safety: these conversations used to happen in university seminars. Now they happen inside corporate walls, where, Traça notes pointedly, the freedom to question has narrower boundaries.
This migration of intellectual authority represents something deeper than a loss of prestige. It's a fracture in the relationship between knowledge and independence. When the university's role was to stand outside power and interrogate it, the university had a particular kind of authority. When knowledge production moves inside the company, that critical distance collapses. Traça's response isn't to retreat into nostalgia. It's to ask what a business school can actually do now that it cannot do anywhere else.
His answer centers on something that sounds almost quaint in a moment of AI acceleration: the humanities. Philosophy, history, art—subjects that business schools have long treated as decorative supplements to the real curriculum of finance and management—need to become central. Not as cultural polish, but as tools for thinking. The faster technology becomes capable of generating plausible answers to technical questions, the more essential it becomes to teach people how to ask the right questions, how to recognize what's missing from a perfect-looking response, how to understand the social and political weight of a technological choice. "Cuanto más poderosa es la tecnología, más importante es tener criterio," he said during an interview at Esade's new Madrid campus in Mirasierra, which opened this academic year. The more powerful the technology, the more important judgment becomes.
Traça frames this pivot as a return to origins. Esade was founded in 1958 within the Jesuit university network, at a moment when Spain was opening to Europe and seeking to form leaders connected to democratic and European values. That founding mission, he argues, has become urgent again. The world is fragmenting—polarization, protectionism, geopolitical tension—and leaders educated only in competitive optimization will not be equipped to navigate it. The school needs to form people who understand that if society fractures, everything else fractures too.
The financial picture supports ambition. Esade closed the 2024-2025 academic year with 136.3 million euros in net revenue, 15.3 million in EBITDA, and 6.8 million in profit. The new Madrid campus, leased but extensively renovated to meet academic needs, signals expansion. Yet Traça is careful not to frame this as Barcelona versus Madrid. Instead, he describes complementarity: Barcelona offers international tradition, entrepreneurial ecosystem, European connection; Madrid provides proximity to economic, institutional, and corporate power. The real competition is with other business schools, and Traça has a metaphor for how Esade should differ: "We want to be a garden, not a tower." Open, connected to companies and communities, rather than closed and elitist.
That openness has a material dimension. Esade allocates 5.4 million euros annually to scholarships for 295 students, with coverage reaching 100 percent of tuition plus living expenses. The school has also introduced Income Share Agreements with the European Investment Fund, allowing students to repay education costs through future earnings. Programs like the Barcelona Talent Accelerator deliberately mix students from privileged backgrounds with those from vulnerable communities in the same classroom. Traça sees this not as charity but as mutual opportunity. The legitimacy and influence of business schools depends on maintaining social diversity, especially as technological change threatens to widen existing gaps.
The immediate practical challenge is assessment. AI has made traditional exams and essays unreliable measures of student knowledge. Traça's team is working on reforms—details still undisclosed—for the coming academic year. But that's the surface problem. The deeper one is how to educate people for a world where the pace of technological change means that specific technical knowledge will be obsolete before they graduate. The answer, he believes, is to combine technical competence with critical thinking, ethics, humanities, and social understanding. People who can understand the world, question it, and generate impact with purpose. In a moment when the world changes faster than any institution can teach, that capacity to think might be the only durable skill.
Notable Quotes
Knowledge no longer originates in the university—it's in the company— Daniel Traça, director general of Esade
Universities used to question tech companies from outside. Now part of that debate happens inside companies like Google or Anthropic, but with fewer freedoms— Daniel Traça
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
When you say knowledge has moved from universities to tech companies, do you mean the cutting-edge research, or something broader?
Both, really. The frontier research happens at places like OpenAI now—that's obvious. But it's also the debates that matter. Where do people wrestle with what AI should be allowed to do? Used to be philosophy departments. Now it's inside Google or Anthropic. The problem is those conversations happen under different rules.
Different rules how?
When you're employed by the company, you're not entirely free to say what you think. You can question, sure, but there are limits. A university can say things that make no one happy. That's the whole point.
So you're trying to reclaim that role—the independent questioner?
Not reclaim it. That's gone. But we can do something different. We can teach people to think in ways that matter when they're inside those companies later. Philosophy, history, ethics—not as decoration. As actual tools for judgment.
But won't AI eventually be able to teach that too?
Maybe. But not in the way a human community can. You need to sit in a room with people who disagree with you, who come from different places, who challenge your assumptions. That's not scalable by algorithm.
Is that why you're so focused on diversity and accessibility?
Exactly. If Esade becomes a place only for the wealthy, we lose that. We become a tower instead of a garden. And we lose legitimacy. Who listens to leaders educated only among themselves?