Kellogg Gets A New Dean for Hard Times

With jobs scarce and its endowment shrinking, Northwestern's business school chooses a new dean well equipped to deal with the challenges ahead

By Geoff Gloeckler

For the first time ever this year, the three top business schools in the Bloomberg BusinessWeek ranking of full-time MBA programs found themselves with vacancies in the dean's office.Last week we launched a three-part series examining the dean searches at No.1 University of Chicago's Booth School of Business (Booth Full-Time MBA Profile), No.2 Harvard Business School (Harvard Full-Time MBA Profile), and No.3 Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management (Kellogg Full-Time MBA Profile). In the first two installments, we described the challenges the new deans will face at Chicago Booth and Harvard and identified some people being mentioned by alumni, students, and faculty as suitable contenders for those posts. Today, in the third and final installment, we turn to Kellogg, where a new dean was named this week.

On Tuesday, Northwestern Provost Daniel I. Linzer announced that Sally Blount, the dean of the undergraduate college and vice-dean of the New York University Stern School of Business (NYU Stern Undergraduate Business Profile), will be the next dean of the Kellogg School of Management.

Blount is a bold choice for Kellogg—a master fund-raiser at a time when Kellogg's endowment sustained annual losses of 26% in 2009 and a curriculum innovator with a global bent and extensive international experience at a time when Kellogg is seeking to continue extending its global reach. "Dean Blount brings a remarkable combination of strong academic achievement and proven administrative experience at both the business school and university levels," Linzer said in a statement.

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Blount, who holds a PhD from Kellogg, has been at Stern since 2001, teaching courses in management, negotiations, and ethics. Before Stern, she was on the faculty at Chicago Booth, where she taught both MBA and executive education courses. Blount also has experience outside academia, working as a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group.

For Blount, 48, the Kellogg position was a natural. She cites three reasons for taking the job. "One was a chance to return to my intellectual home," she says. "Another is this deep value of collaboration that Kellogg has. The third was this amazing match with the skill sets I've been developing throughout my career, especially as an administrator at NYU."

Beginning in July, Blount replaces interim dean Sunil Chopra and assumes the position being vacated by Dipak Jain, who announced in June that he was stepping down after eight years as dean. Jain, who plans to return to teaching at Kellogg after a one-year leave of absence, was highly regarded at Kellogg and beyond.

As dean, Jain focused on expanding Kellogg's global reach through both international course requirements for MBAs and new partnerships with the Guanghua School of Management in Beijing and the Schulich School of Business (Schulich Full-Time MBA Profile) at York University in Toronto. Jain also spearheaded efforts to update the curriculum and established an executive MBA program in Miami.

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