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Who really said it

When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course

Attributed to Peter Drucker 1909–2005 · Austrian-American management theorist and writer
Attributed In copyright

The joke is genuinely Drucker’s — he put it in print himself in The Age of Discontinuity (Harper & Row, 1969, page 193), but in different words: “If a subject has become obsolete, the university faculty makes a required course out of it.” The crisp one-liner people quote is not in that book; its earliest documented appearance is a 1976 appendix of Drucker remarks assembled by his biographer John J. Tarrant, per Quote Investigator ↗.

Last verified 17 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course” attributed to Peter Drucker (1909–2005). Drucker printed the thought himself in The Age of Discontinuity (Harper & Row, 1969), p. 193, in different words: "If a subject has become obsolete, the university faculty makes a required course out of it." The compact one-liner is documented from 1976, in the appendix of John J. Tarrant's Drucker: The Man Who Invented the Corporate Society, p. 260. Source: Quotle.info

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The Peter F. Drucker estate, with Harper and Row (1969 edition) and Cahners Books (Tarrant, 1976)). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Peter Drucker — Austrian-American management consultant, educator and author. Theme: "When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

The documented record

Drucker's own wording
The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society
Published
Harper & Row, New York, 1969 — quote page 193 (verified on paper by Quote Investigator)
The popular one-liner
John J. Tarrant, Drucker: The Man Who Invented the Corporate Society, Cahners Books, Boston, 1976 — appendix, page 260
Drucker's later restatement
Managing for the Future: The 1990s and Beyond, Truman Talley Books/Dutton, New York, 1992 — page 339

Organization is always in danger of being overwhelmed by yesterday’s tasks and being rendered sterile by them. If a subject has become obsolete, the university faculty makes a required course out of it—and this “solves the problem” for the time being. The Age of Discontinuity, 1969, p. 193

This is Drucker’s own printed sentence, not the one-liner. Note what the compression drops: the 1969 version names the university faculty as the actor and adds the sting about pretending the problem is solved. The familiar “we make it a required course” is the 1976 compilation form.

Scanned first edition
Borrow the Harper and Row 1969 first edition at the Internet Archive
Quote Investigator’s full chronology of the saying

Citation trail

  • 1969 — Drucker puts the idea in print himself, in The Age of Discontinuity (Harper & Row): “If a subject has become obsolete, the university faculty makes a required course out of it.” Quote Investigator verified the passage on paper at page 193 ↗.
  • 1976 — The compact one-liner surfaces in John J. Tarrant’s biography Drucker: The Man Who Invented the Corporate Society, in what QI calls “a ten-page appendix filled with remarks by Peter Drucker,” at page 260; the Fall 1976 Wharton Magazine reprinted sayings from that appendix. Both citations are logged by Quote Investigator ↗.
  • 1977–1988 — The one-liner is carried forward by quotation anthologies, each crediting Drucker: Peter’s Quotations (1977, page 117), The Book of Quotes (1979, page 170) and The Dictionary of Outrageous Quotations (1988, page 29). All three verified on paper ↗.
  • 1992 — Drucker returns to the joke in Managing for the Future, calling it a university motto: “when a subject becomes totally obsolete, then a required course should be built around it.” Quote Investigator, page 339 ↗.
In copyright

Every documented source for this line is modern and still protected. Drucker’s own wording appeared in The Age of Discontinuity (Harper & Row, 1969) and the familiar one-liner in John J. Tarrant’s biography (Cahners Books, 1976) — both well past the 1931 cutoff for U.S. public domain. Quote it briefly with attribution; it is not free to reproduce at length.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What usually goes wrong with this one

The name on this quote is right. What travels wrongly is the sentence — the version everyone repeats is a compressed form that Drucker never printed in either of the two books where he made the joke himself.

Peter Drucker — but not as he wrote it Mis-worded

Quote sites present “When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course” as though it were lifted from a Drucker book. It was not. His 1969 sentence runs “If a subject has become obsolete, the university faculty makes a required course out of it,” and his 1992 sentence casts it as a university motto, per Quote Investigator’s paper-verified citations ↗.

John J. Tarrant, Drucker’s 1976 biographer Compiler

Tarrant’s Drucker: The Man Who Invented the Corporate Society closes with what Quote Investigator describes as “a ten-page appendix filled with remarks by Peter Drucker,” and the familiar one-liner sits there at page 260 — a compiler’s rendering of Drucker’s remarks, not a passage from one of his own books. See the citation ↗.

Quotation anthologies, 1977 onward Repeaters

Once the compact form existed it was copied wholesale: Peter’s Quotations (1977), Barbara Rowes’ The Book of Quotes (1979) and The Dictionary of Outrageous Quotations (1988) all carry it credited to Drucker, each verified on paper by Quote Investigator ↗. Anthology-to-anthology copying is why the 1976 phrasing, not Drucker’s, became the standard text.

Credit Drucker with the thought — Quote Investigator concludes he can properly be credited with the saying ↗ — but if you want his actual sentence, quote the 1969 one.

Context

Why a management writer was picking on universities

Drucker was not making a cheap crack about professors. The 1969 sentence sits inside an argument about organizational inertia — his claim that every institution, however clever, drifts toward protecting what it already does. Yesterday’s task has a department, a budget and a defender; tomorrow’s has nobody. A required course, in that reading, is what an institution builds when it wants to look like it has settled a question instead of actually settling it.

He kept returning to the joke because he kept making the same point. By 1992, in Managing for the Future, he had reframed it as a standing “motto” of American universities, sitting right after the line that there is nothing more reactionary than a liberal faculty — the setup for an argument that universities, like businesses, have to learn how to innovate or stop being useful.

If a subject has become obsolete, the university faculty makes a required course out of it.

The three versions, side by side

1969, in Drucker’s own book: “If a subject has become obsolete, the university faculty makes a required course out of it” — and this “solves the problem” for the time being.

1976, in Tarrant’s appendix of Drucker remarks: “When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.” This is the version the internet quotes.

1992, in Drucker’s own book again: “It is the motto of the U.S. universities that when a subject becomes totally obsolete, then a required course should be built around it.”

Quote Investigator declines to crown one of these the “real” quotation, concluding instead that Drucker can properly be credited with the saying and that a reader may pick whichever of the three versions suits.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Knowledge Change Doubt

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: the full citation trailquoteinvestigator.com

The definitive investigation. Traces the saying from Drucker’s 1969 book through Tarrant’s 1976 appendix, the Fall 1976 Wharton Magazine, three quotation anthologies, and Drucker’s own 1992 restatement — most entries marked “Verified on paper.”
The Age of Discontinuity (Harper & Row, 1969)archive.org

Scan of the 428-page Harper & Row first edition, borrowable through the Internet Archive’s lending programme. This is the book carrying Drucker’s own wording at page 193.
Tarrant, Drucker: The Man Who Invented the Corporate Society (1976)archive.org

Scan of John J. Tarrant’s Cahners Books biography — the volume whose appendix of Drucker remarks is the earliest documented home of the exact one-liner.
Managing for the Future (Truman Talley Books/Dutton, 1992)archive.org

Scan of the 1992 book in which Drucker restated the gag a third time, as the “motto of the U.S. universities,” at page 339.
Peter Drucker on Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote’s sourced Drucker page. Worth knowing that this line does not appear there at all — the page’s only Misattributed entry is “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
About Peter Druckerdrucker.institute

Biography from the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, covering his teaching posts and the arc of his major books.

The man who invented management

Who was Peter Drucker?

Peter Drucker

1909–2005 · Austrian-American management consultant, educator and author

Peter Ferdinand Drucker was born in Vienna in 1909 and died in California in 2005, eight days short of his ninety-sixth birthday. Wikipedia describes him ↗ as an Austrian American management consultant, educator and author “whose writings contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of modern management theory.” He taught at Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, NYU and Claremont Graduate University, and wrote books — The Practice of Management, The Effective Executive, The Age of Discontinuity — that turned management into a subject you could actually study. He was also a reliable wit about institutions that refuse to change, which is exactly the vein this line comes from.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

How to cite this

Peter F. Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 193 — Drucker's own wording. The familiar one-liner is documented from 1976, in John J. Tarrant, Drucker: The Man Who Invented the Corporate Society (Boston: Cahners Books, 1976), appendix, 260, and in The Wharton Magazine 1, no. 1 (Fall 1976): 14.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/when-a-subject-becomes-totally-obsolete-we-make-it-a/

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