A legacy built to last: Why closing a school can be an act of leadership

I spent nearly 20 years at Lake Forest Graduate School of Management (LFGSM) — as a student, as a leader, and ultimately as its president.

In that time, I watched this institution do what great institutions do: evolve.

LFGSM was founded in the aftermath of World War II to give working adults a path forward. It pioneered the Business Leader Faculty model — the conviction that the best teachers of leadership are people who have actually led. It grew from a noncredit certificate program into a fully accredited MBA institution delivering programs on campuses, at corporate sites, and over Zoom long before the rest of higher education caught up. That is not a small legacy. That is a remarkable one.

So I want to be honest about what it meant to make the decision to wind down the school’s MBA program. It was not easy. It was not made quickly. And it was not made without grief. When an institution has shaped the lives of thousands of leaders — when its alumni run companies, lead teams, and carry its values into boardrooms and communities across the country — closing a chapter of that institution is a weight you feel.

But leadership requires the ability to see around the corner. And what I saw, after years of watching enrollment trends and listening carefully to what working professionals need, was this: the pace of business has outrun the pace of the traditional degree. People and organizations need leadership development that is faster, more targeted, and directly tied to the real challenges in front of them today. That insight didn’t diminish what LFGSM built — it pointed the way forward.

That forward path runs through the Lake Forest Center for Leadership.

The Center for Leadership has always been the living expression of what made LFGSM distinctive: practitioner-led programming, grounded in real business experience, designed for people who don’t have time for theory disconnected from practice.

Its Pathway Programs, skill-building courses, and comprehensive leadership development offerings do exactly what the market is asking for — provide immediately applicable leadership capability, delivered by people who have done the work themselves. At the Center for Leadership, the LFGSM mission doesn’t end. It accelerates.

What makes me genuinely proud is where the Center for Leadership is headed. The Center for Leadership is joining Excelsior University and becoming part of a national ecosystem built around exactly the learners we have always served. Excelsior was founded in 1971, 10 years after LFGSM, and for the same reason: to create access and opportunity for working adults, including the many who serve or have served in the military. The alignment runs deep.

Under this partnership, the Lake Forest Center for Leadership keeps its name, its faculty model, and its programs. What it gains is reach — Excelsior’s national infrastructure, student pipeline, and marketing platform — and continuity. The Center for Leadership’s participants and client organizations will now have a broader continuum of opportunity behind the programs they already trust: from leadership development into certificate and degree pathways, if and when they want them. More is available. Nothing is taken away.

I am also grateful for what Excelsior did for our MBA students who could not complete their degrees before the program’s conclusion. Seamless transfer pathways, credit recognition, a genuine effort to ensure no one was left without a way to finish what they started. That is not a given in higher education. It mattered enormously to me, and I believe it reflects who Excelsior is as an institution.

I think often about the leaders who have passed through LFGSM and the Center for Leadership over the decades. They came to us because they believed that investing in their own growth would make them better managers, better executives, better people. They were right. And the best thing I can do to honor that belief is to make sure the institution that shaped them continues to shape others, in ways that fit the world they are navigating.

Closing a chapter is not the same as abandoning a legacy. Sometimes it is the most faithful act of stewardship available to you. LFGSM’s legacy lives in its alumni, in the values they carry, in the Lake Forest Center for Leadership, and now in a national partnership built to carry that work further than we could have taken it alone.

We were built to last. We will.

Carrie Buchwald served as president of the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management and now serves on the board of Education Upward.