From CEO to Business Dean

A small but growing number of business schools are hiring ex-corporate CEO’s as their leaders, BusinessWeek reports.

Just last week, Kenneth Freeman, ex-CEO of Quest Diagnostics Inc., and Neil Braun, ex-CEO of Viacom Entertainment and ex-president of NBC Television, assumed new posts as deans of Boston University’s School of Management and Pace University’s Lubin School of Business, respectively, the magazine notes. Both schools have looked to the corporate world for deans before, the article points out. Wake Forest and Ohio State Universities also have business deans that hail from the private sector. 

Someone with a business background might seem like a natural pick to head up a business school, so it might surprise you as much as it did me to learn that ex-executives are still rare in the business-education world. BusinessWeek writes that according to a 2007 survey of 355 U.S. and international business-school deans conducted by a leading accreditator of business schools (which goes by the unwieldy name of AACSB International: the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business), only 15 deans had served as corporate president or CEO and four came from a vice-president or senior manager role, versus 328 who came from academic jobs.

“It is still the exception, but maybe the exception isn’t as odd or as unusual as it was 10 or 15 years ago,” John Fernandes, president of AACSB, told a reporter for the magazine.

Dan King, executive director of the American Association of University Administrators, said he expects to see more search committees seeking candidates with corporate-executive backgrounds as today’s business deans are assuming a more-public role than in the past:

“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,” he told BusinessWeek. “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.”