Search committees at business schools are increasingly considering chief executive officers for top administrative positions, with two business schools in Boston and New York recently tapping former CEOs to head up their schools as deans.
This week, Kenneth Freeman, the former CEO of Quest Diagnostics Inc. (DGX), a Teterboro (N.J.)-based provider of medical testing services, is starting his new role as dean of Boston University School of Management (BU Full-Time MBA Profile). Neil Braun, the former CEO of Viacom Entertainment (VIA) and former president of NBC Television Network, joined Pace University's Lubin School of Business (Lubin Full-Time MBA Profile) as dean on July 1.
The two men join a handful of American business schools that have tapped corporate executives as deans in the past five years, including Wake Forest University's Schools of Business (Wake Forest Full-Time MBA Profile) in Winston-Salem, N.C., and Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business (Fisher Full-Time MBA Profile) in Columbus. These schools are recruiting outside academia in an attempt to raise their visibility, differentiate themselves from competitors, and bring a more business-style approach to running the institution, says Dan King, executive director of the American Association of University Administrators, a nonprofit in Stoughton, Mass., that offers programs and services for university administrators.
"That kind of narrow and bounded perception of what deans do has changed really dramatically, so now in many places there is really a heightened expectation that the dean should be the public face of the school," said King in a telephone interview on July 27. "Business schools, in particular, want to present a prestigious public face. One way of presenting that image is showing they can recruit a leader who has been a successful executive in business and industry."
Though schools like Boston University and Pace are turning to the corporate world for leadership, business school deans who are former executives remain a minority in the management education world, according to a 2007 survey of 355 U.S. and international business school deans done by the Tampa-based Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), one of the leading accreditation agencies for business schools. In the survey, 15 deans came from jobs as corporate president or CEO and four came from a vice-president or senior manager role, compared with 328 who had other academic posts.
"It is still the exception, but maybe the exception isn't as odd or as unusual as it was 10 or 15 years ago," said John Fernandes, president of AACSB, in a telephone interview on July 27.
Boston University School of Management was one of the first business schools to tap the corporate world for a dean, hiring Louis E. Lataif, the former president of Ford Motor Co.'s (F) European operations, as dean in 1991. When it came time to search for a successor to Lataif, the school looked at candidates from both the academic world and the business community, said N. Venkat Venkatraman, a management professor who chaired the business school's dean search committee, in a telephone interview on July 21. Of the 10 finalists for the job, four were from Fortune 500 companies, while the remaining six were academics, he said. With the business school coming up on its 100th anniversary in 2013, the committee was looking for a person who could improve the school's visibility in the Boston area, as well as nationally and globally, and Freeman's track record impressed the committee, Venkatraman said.
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