Heard on Campus

Gupta Looking for a Leg Up
Most of the time, people who are looking for a new job keep their old one until the new one is safely in the bag. In the case of Yash Gupta, dean of USC's Marshall School of Business, that turned out not to be a viable option.

Gupta, 53, surprised his colleagues and resigned from his position on Feb. 3 after just a year and a half on the job. At the time, the school declined to say why Gupta had stepped down, but in a recent interview with BusinessWeek Online, Gupta said that his very public search for another academic position had made it difficult for him at USC, where he was leading a major fundraising effort for the school.

"I'm trying to pursue the presidency and chancellorships of other universities," Gupta says. "It made more sense not being a dean than being a dean. Whenever you're a candidate elsewhere, it creates a lot of tension." Recently, Gupta was one of four finalists for the presidency of the University of Arizona. He was not selected.

PROVEN RECORD.  Although he is maintaining his tenured faculty position within Marshall's information and operations management department, Gupta's resignation from the deanship took effect immediately. He isn't currently teaching any courses and says he's unsure if he'll return to teach again, preferring to dedicate himself to the job search full time.

Gupta had previously held deanships at the College of Business Administration at the University of Colorado at Denver and most recently at the University of Washington Business School, where he was able to boost fund raising significantly.

Marshall officials didn't elaborate on the situation, but they noted they had searched 18 months before selecting Gupta for the deanship. During his short tenure, Gupta raised $55.54 million. Still, observers within and outside the school indicated that Gupta's job hunt could have impacted fundraising efforts.

"I don't know that it's impossible to raise money in that circumstance," says Fenwick Huss, dean of the Georgia State Robinson College of Business. "But it would make it a bit more difficult, because development is about forming relationships between the donor and school, but also between the dean and other development personnel. It may make it more difficult to establish those kinds of relationships if donors perceive some type of transition to be going on."

When Marshall hired Gupta, its full-time MBA program had fallen in all of the major rankings, including a 10-place drop from 17 to 27 in BusinessWeek's MBA rankings between 2002 and 2004. Gupta immediately assembled a task force to revamp the school's curriculum.

Thomas Gilligan, professor of finance and business economics at Marshall, was immediately named interim dean, though Marshall didn't formally announce his appointment until Mar. 8. Gilligan says he aims to continue the recent curriculum revamp (see BW Online, 8/10/05, "Pushing MBAs Beyond the Books"). "I was very proud to have been part of [Gupta's] leadership team," says Gilligan. "We accomplished quite a bit in 18 months. My goal is to ensure that we implement these plans in the quickest time possible."

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Tyson Returns Stateside
London Business School Dean Laura Tyson recently announced that she will step down in December to pursue a part-time faculty appointment at the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business.

This won't be Tyson's first time at Haas. She originally joined the school's faculty in 1990 and became dean there in 1998. Officially, Tyson has been on leave from Haas since she left in 2002 to become the dean of LBS.

In a letter to the LBS community, Tyson outlined her future plans, while pledging to maintain her relationship with London Business School as a visiting professor. Before her official departure, Tyson says she will continue to advance the priorities established during her deanship, which include recruiting faculty, fundraising, and launching a center for women in business.

OPTIONS OPEN.  Though Tyson declined to comment on her imminent departure for this story, the folks at Haas say they are happy that she's returning. "The students are excited, because she's a great teacher as well as a distinguished national figure," says Dean Tom Campbell. "She adds tremendous luster to the school."

Tyson also has a strong background in the political arena. She served as chairperson of the National Economic Council from 1995 to 1996 and of President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors from 1993 until 1995. And while it isn't clear whether she would have a role in a possible Hillary Clinton presidential bid -- Tyson did say in a message to the LBS community that she would be spending part of her time on "additional board, consulting, and political activities."

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Harvard Business School Online Education
In the fall of 2005, D. Quinn Mills, a longtime professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, offered a traditional leadership course in a completely nontraditional format. Mills's half-credit, eight-week elective on leadership, "How to Lead, How to Live," was the first entirely online course for on-campus students at Harvard. It was offered to second year HBS students, and they never met as a group, face to face.

"To my knowledge, this is the first completely online course at Harvard and the first ever in the world that is only for on-campus students," says Mills, who adds that the course is a product of his interest in applying technology to education.

TALK TO ME.  Chris Laws, a second-year student, says the online format was well-suited to the topic of leadership, something that required introspection on the part of students. "I don't think it would be as good for strategy or finance where the things you're learning are frameworks and ways to approach problems," says Laws.

The course was largely an experiment to test the waters in online learning at Harvard. Mills agrees that the online format could never replace classroom learning. But he notes the format's several advantages, especially its ability to draw shy students out of their shells. "People who are reticent to talk in large rooms with people there come out on the discussion boards on the Internet. It involves people in a way you can't face to face," says Mills.

There was still plenty of interaction, Mills asserts, but it was all done by students at their laptops, as they worked -- at their leisure -- on assignments from home, the library, or any other site they chose.

The online format gave Mills the ability to check on his students' progress by allowing him to view how much time they had spent on a given assignment. Thanks to this technology, if students are having difficulty, says Mills, he can tell if it's because they're not spending enough time on an assignment or it's simply too difficult.

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