The position of interim dean can be pretty bewitching, as Joe Thomas will testify. He took up the temporary position at the Johnson school at Cornell University in June 2007 when Robert Swieringa stepped down as dean, pending the appointment of a permanent replacement.
Then the bug bit him. “I thought at the time I wasn’t going to [become dean]. But I love the place and the business school,” muses Professor Thomas. “Eventually they asked more persuasively...”
Prof Thomas was not the first dean to be so tempted. At Harvard Business School, Jay Light became interim dean in August 2005 and then took the appointment proper in April 2006 because, he said, he was getting to like the job. More recently, Andrew Likierman at London Business School was interim dean between January and September 2007, a period he described as frustrating because he was just handing on the job from one dean to another. He signed a five-year contract as dean of LBS in January this year.
All three deans are longstanding members of the faculty, with vast institutional knowledge. Prof Thomas joined Cornell in 1967 and rose through the ranks to become a chaired professor.
They are also drawing their deans’ salaries when most people would be drawing a pension. Both Prof Light and Prof Likierman were 64 when they accepted the role. Prof Thomas was 66 when he was appointed in March 2008.
Not that you would know. With the mental agility of a man half his age and a globetrotting agenda to make most people weep with fatigue, Prof Thomas says he now misses teaching full courses on the MBA programme in his specialist subject of supply chain integration and manufacturing strategy. But, he adds: “I do make cameo appearances.”
Prof Thomas acknowledges this is a difficult time to become dean, with real problems in finding jobs for this year’s graduating students. Although many Cornell graduates already have jobs in hand, others have not. But, like many other institutions, the Johnson school has beefed up its careers office. “The two things we would defend are placement and our academic programmes,” says the dean.
Like many an internal appointee, Prof Thomas sees his main role as continuing the success of the business school rather than bringing about revolutionary change. He intends to retain the balance between academic and practical learning. “People must learn the theory – there’s nothing so practical as a good theory – but they need to put it into practice.”
His second aim is consolidation of the business school’s links with the main university, one of the largest of the Ivy Leagues, by building on existing programmes in areas such as hospitality and financial engineering.
Third, he wants to build on the community strengths of the business school, which is small by US standards, with just above 300 students enrolling in the first year of the two-year MBA each year and a faculty of about 60.
But there are also things he wants to develop. Top of his list is the need to make the Johnson School a global one, which at first sounds problematic given Cornell’s isolated location in Ithaca in New York state. But the school is learning how to overcome that.
Attracting overseas students to the MBA programme has taken a knock this year, probably because of the unavailability of student loans owing to the credit crunch. He reports that, although domestic applications are rising, those from overseas students are down by about 20 per cent.
But he has other weapons in his armoury. Undoubtedly one of the school’s most global programmes is the EMBA it runs with Queen’s University in Canada, which is conducted simultaneously in more than a dozen locations in the two countries, using video-conferencing.
“Once you learn how to do this, there is no reason you can’t have people [studying] in North America, Europe and Asia all at the same time,” says Prof Thomas. “In the future, I’d like to see a truly global MBA.”
He also intends to build on the school’s community approach to give individual students a more personalised experience, with targeted advice. “I believe the world is complicated enough...that we need to have more individualised help – and our size means we can do that.”
