Betting The Future Of A B-School On The Future

A CORPORATE EXECUTIVE APPROACH TO HIGHER EDUCATION

The wonder of it all is that this relative newcomer to the deanship is not an academic visionary but rather a pragmatic and hard-nosed executive. Freeman had worked at Corning Inc. since 1972, rising through the finance ranks, until the company asked him to take the top leadership role of its Quest Diagnostics unit in 1995. He led the spin off of that business in 1997, increasing its market value from $350 million when it was brought public to $9 billion-plus when he left as Chairman and CEO in 2004. Freeman then moved on to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) where he helped to oversee the firm’s private equity investments.

After BU School of Management Dean Louis Lataif, a former high-ranking Ford Motor executive, announced plans to retire in late 2009, a search committee cast a wide net for a successor. It approached Freeman to see if he would be interested in applying for the job. While at KKR, he had been an executive-in-residence at Columbia Business School, which led to invitations to teach “transformational leadership” in BU’s core course on organizational behavior for three years in a row. “I guess I got a passing grade because I was invited back,” he laughs.

At the time, it was his only connection to Boston University. Freeman had earned his undergraduate degree in business in 1972 from Bucknell University, where he served as chairman of the Board of Trustees. He earned his MBA in 1976 from Harvard Business School.

A FIRST GENERATION COLLEGE GRAD WHO WANTED A CHANCE TO IMPACT NEXT GEN LEADERSHIP

Though some faculty believed it was time to have a pure academic in the job, three professors put Freeman’s name in nomination. “I had been thinking about higher education for awhile,” he says. “I’m a first generation college grad and this is opportunity to impact the next generation of leaders.”

His successor had made significant progress during a 19-year stint as dean. During Lataif’s tenure, the number of undergraduate applications to the university soared, from 1,943 in 1991 to 4,305, and average SAT scores of accepted students rose more than 200 points. The year before his arrival, the school was not even ranked by Business Week. Its full-time MBA program is now ranked 38th, while its undergraduate business degree is ranked 18th. Poets&Quants currently ranks BU’s full-time MBA program in 36th place.

Freeman assumed the deanship on Aug. 1 of 2010, met individually with every faculty member of the school, and then made two quick changes. He made sure there was free coffee in the faculty lounge and he relocated the dean’s expansive office from the top floor of the school’s six-story facility to a more egalitarian, second-floor space closer to students.

EARLY IMPRESSIONS: WEAK ALUMNI ENGAGEMENT AND AN OBSOLETE CURRICULUM

“You had to go through double glass doors and a wood-veneered lobby and two administrative assistants to get into my office,” he recalls. “It was the most ostentatious office I ever had in my life. My belief is in leadership is that is accessible, transparent and available. I’m now 100 feet from the Starbucks on our undergraduate classroom floor. At least ten to 15 students and five faculty members stop by on any normal academic day. I am here to serve this community and I now have that chance.”

More substantively, Freeman came to some other conclusions. “Walking in the door, I knew this was a school that had risen nicely under Dean Lataif,” he says. “But I think the school was waiting for what do we do next. It had not become complacent, but it wasn’t as energized a place as I might have anticipated. This was not a turnaround in any way shape or form. But there was a relative lack of intensity over where we were going and how we were going to get there.”

Freeman also made another quick discovery. “I also found that not unlike a lot of schools, alumni engagement was very limited,” he says. “We have 45,000 living alumni of this school which will be 100 years old in 2013. Yet, no one knew that we would have our 100th birthday only two years after I got here. No one knew it–not the alumni or the faculty. There was a thin veneer of very loyal donors—maybe 100 to 150 and then the rest was like that cheap fiberboard in IKEA furniture. That was a surprise.”