Still Wanted in Chicago

Ted Snyder, the departing dean of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, will be a tough act to follow. The university conceded as much on June 29 when it announced that it hasn’t yet found a successor to Snyder, despite the fact that he had publicly announced his departure last December. In a statement to the school’s faculty, the university said that the dean search is in its final stages and a further announcement is expected by the end of July. A trio of deputy deans – Stacey Kole, deputy dean of the full-time MBA programme, Mark Zmijewski and Richard Leftwich, deputy dean for faculty – will run the school in the interim, the university announced.

Most observers were expecting that a new dean would have been announced by now. Snyder went public with his decision to leave last December and presumably told university officials before that time. By all accounts, Snyder has done an extraordinary job at Chicago, landing the largest single gift ever given to a business school, a $300 million pledge that caused the school to be renamed the Booth School of Business. Just as importantly, he helped to boost the school’s reputation, gaining a number one ranking from BusinessWeek in two consecutive surveys in 2008 and 2006. Snyder, an economist, joined Chicago as dean in July of 2001 after a successful stint as the dean at the University of Virgina’s Darden School of Business. In the year before he arrived at Chicago, the school was ranked the 10th best business school in the U.S. by BusinessWeek.

After a year’s leave, Snyder will become dean of Yale University’s School of Management, long an under-leveraged business school.

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