The MBA Bull Market Has Legs

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Pirkul said he is not surprised that Wharton has remained at the top of the list for the past three years. "It's a direct reflection of the quality of the faculty and also a reflection of the size of the school," he said. "They happen to do well in the MBA rankings, they're a high quality school, and they deploy their resources well."

The rankings are weighted by the number of co-authors for each article, but they are not adjusted by the size of the school or faculty. "A smaller school that may have outstanding faculty is at a disadvantage," Pirkul conceded.

The rankings are part of a Web site the UT-Dallas School of Management created about five years ago to track academic research in business journals to see how Dallas compared to other business schools (it ranked 32nd, with 69 articles).

Chicago's Big Gift

University of Chicago alumnus Charles Harper has given the Graduate School of Business one of the largest private donations ever made to the university. Harper, a former chairman and chief executive of RJR Nabsico, asked that the size of the gift not be disclosed. The university is renaming the business-school building, now known as the Hyde Park Center, the Charles M. Harper Center. Harper received his MBA from the school in 1950. The state-of-the-art business-school building, completed in 2004, accommodates 1,100 full-time MBA students, in addition to PhD students and faculty. The business school is in the midst of a capital campaign and hopes to raise $300 million by next June, $283 million of which has already been raised, officials said.

Rutgers, Brandeis, Miami Name Deans

Rutgers Business School has named Michael Cooper as its new dean, effective June. Cooper served as the founding dean of the Executive Leadership Institute and associate dean of the Howe School of Technology Management at the Stevens Institute of Technology from 2002 to 2004. He is chair and managing partner of Cooper Interest, a company he founded in 1999 to provide private equity investments and strategy counsel to small and midsize companies. He will take over for Rosa Oppenheim, who has served as acting dean since last July.

Bruce Magid of the College of Business at San Jose State University was tapped as the new dean for Brandeis University's International Business School, effective July. Magid served as the founding executive director of Michigan State University Global, the school's online and global distance education business unit, before heading to San Jose to serve as dean. Magid will succeed F. Trenery Dolbear Jr., currently serving as acting dean of the business schools.

The University of Miami's School of Business Administration has picked Wharton Vice-Dean Barbara Kahn as its new dean, effective August. She succeeds Paul Sugrue, who will leave at the end of this year after 30 years at the school, 15 of which were spent as dean. Kahn is currently the Dorothy Silberberg Professor of Marketing and vice-dean and director of the undergraduate division at Wharton.

Damast is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.