Former Dean Of Troubled B-School Dies

Former Bloch School dean Teng-Kee Tan

The former dean of the Bloch School of Management at the University of Missouri-Kansas City has died. Ten-Kee Tan passed away peacefully in Seattle with his family around him, according to the Kansas City Star. He was in his 60s and had left Bloch in 2013, reportedly suffering from pancreatic cancer. Tan is survived by his wife and two children.

The former dean, who came to Bloch after 20 years in multinational corporations and 10 years as a manufacturing entrepreneur, specialized in dilemma reconciliation theory, according to his Bloch profile.

Tan headed the school when false data was submitted to the Princeton Review and a controversial journal article about the school was published.

He had become dean in 2009. After Bloch in 2011 lost its top-25 ranking from the Princeton Review for its graduate entrepreneurship program, Tan pressured administrators to improve the rankings position. Investigations by the Star revealed that Bloch subsequently submitted false data to the Princeton Review, and a Pricewaterhouse Coopers audit determined that former professor Michael Song had partly written an article in the Journal of Product Innovation Management that named Song the best innovation-management researcher in the world, and Bloch the No. 1 school in that area.

LOSING POSITION, GAINING DEFICIT

The Princeton Review stripped the school from four years of its rankings, and the journal backed away from the validity of the article’s findings.

Song, who resigned in February, had been the third-highest-paid employee in the university, making $400,000 a year, while Tan’s salary ranged from $407,000 to $500,000. A later PwC audit found that from 2009 to 2014 Bloch had increased enrollment by 21% but increased its operational deficit 600% to $10.6 million from $1.5 million.

DON’T MISS: THE DARK SIDE OF MBA RANKINGS