For the Record:
Faculty Senate Report, June 12 Meeting
continued
Dean's Report on the Graduate School of Business (SenD#4723)
The Chair welcomed Dean A. Michael Spence to report on the Graduate School of Business (GSB), following a tradition of reports educating the Senate about all of the schools of the University and their relations to Senate business.
Spence began by recounting the advice he had received, as a first-year assistant professor, from a very wise older colleague: "If you're teaching something that's highly technical or mathematical [in my field, which is Economics], wear jeans and a T-shirt. If you don't know what you're talking about or it's pretty fuzzy, wear a suit." Spence, impeccably dressed, said he would let the audience draw its own conclusions, adding that "after being a dean for 13 years, you have to own a lot of suits." He introduced several Associate Dean colleagues in attendance, giving special credit to Joan Karlin for writing the background document distributed in advance.
Beginning with a few general remarks, Spence said that Stanford can be proud of the role the GSB has played in the post-WWII period of management education. He identified previous Stanford deans and individual faculty members who had done their part in bringing business schools into the academic enterprise, helping to make them rigorous scholarly places. He stated that the dominant philosophy of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford is "balanced excellence," meaning a balance in commitment to scholarly excellence on the one side and to the needs of its professional constituents on the other. Stanford's GSB is positioned between Harvard, whose commitment has been more toward the practitioner end, and Chicago, which has traditionally been absolutely superb in scholarly terms, Spence indicated. The GSB is quite small relative to its five or six serious competitors, with for example 360 MBA students per class compared to over 800 at Harvard. These students have GMAT scores approximately 50 points higher than the next-nearest competitor, "very bright, challenging students, and a match for the faculty," he stated.
Because of its small size, the GSB has no departments and "one's intellectual life runs across areas within the school and across school boundaries," Spence indicated. "We are, by discipline, economists, operations researchers, sociologists, psychologists and so on. We just couldn't recruit our faculty if we weren't embedded in a great university like Stanford, and in particular if we weren't embedded in a university that has the openness that Stanford does." Spence said he expects this reliance on the rest of the university to increase as Stanford and the GSB "set off on this path to become more international and global in outlook," with greater scholarly interactions in fields such as languages, area studies, and international relations.
The GSB's strategy for the future, Spence related, is to remain relatively small, but to increase faculty size from 85 to 95 or 100, to facilitate a more labor-intensive international and global research and course development agenda as well as some growth in executive education. The latter is made possible by the construction of the new Schwab Center, he said, which will be used for executive education during the summer and during the academic year will house 220 masters students with 60 rooms held back for executive programs and academic conferences. Spence invited other schools to take advantage of the facility. Commenting on the fact that executive education makes a profit, Spence said that many universities have tended to expand such programs "beyond the academic merits." Stanford, on the other hand, had underinvested in the academic content of executive education and has worked hard to turn that around, Spence advised.
The GSB's most serious challenge
according to Spence is faculty development. Young faculty recruited
with Ph.D.s in disciplines such as sociology, economics, operations
research, and so on, face the three-fold challenge, he said, of
building an impressive international research trajectory in their
discipline, of quickly acquiring the skills to teach professional
students who are older than they are and demand a certain degree of
relevance, and, for many, of broadening their disciplinary
perspectives to take on general management characteristics in their
teaching. "Not everybody succeeds in this," Spence said, "and my
impression is that the speed with which young people are being
asked to make these transitions has risen quite dramatically in the
last decade or so." Possible answers to this challenge, he
indicated, might be not recruiting people who are just starting
out, or establishing a transition period adapted from the
postdoctoral model in the sciences and engineering.