Highly Rated Haas Lecturer Quits

Reza Moazzami

One of the highest-rated faculty members at U.C. Berkeley’s Haas School of Business has quit, reportedly over an administrative “mess.”

Reza Moazzami, formerly a lecturer teaching classes related to IT and entrepreneurship, resigned Sept. 10, the school confirmed.

“This is an academic personnel matter. We cannot comment further,” says Haas spokesperson Ute Frey.

Classes in the school’s evening/weekend MBA (EWMBA) program, where Moazzami taught, started in August.

Moazzami had for years been a fixture on the school’s “Club 6” list  – a “key measure of teaching excellence,” according to Haas – of faculty who earned median scores of at least six on a seven-point scale in student evaluations for at least one course in a given semester. He also consistently received “special mention” on that list for earning sixes or higher in multiple courses per term.

‘BEST CLASS I TOOK AT HAAS DURING MY MBA’

“I’d say that Reza’s ‘The Future of Information Technology’ may have been the best class I took at Haas during my MBA,” Haas MBA class of 2009 graduate Michael Chou writes on Quora.com in a post this year.

In a 2011 Haas promotional brochure, the school singles out Moazzami for praise, noting his “more than fifteen years of experience as an engineer, entrepreneur/CEO, investor, patent holder, and educator in the IT and communications industries.”

A purported leaked email from Moazzami says, “It’s unfortunate that it has to end this way but there have just been one too many manufactured ‘crises’ in the school’s administration over recent years. Since the EWMBA program office, Jay Stowsky, and other university administrators created this mess, I shall leave it to them to clean up after themselves.”

HAAS SAYS NO COMMENT. TWICE.

Stowsky, senior assistant dean for instruction, did not respond to a request for comment, though spokesperson Frey received notice of the request and repeated that the school couldn’t comment on an academic personnel matter.

For the fall semester currently underway, Moazzami is listed on a Haas course schedule, posted online as “tentative,” teaching two evening/weekend MBA classes in Corporate Strategy in Telecommunications and Media. A tentative schedule for the upcoming spring semester shows him teaching two classes in Strategy for the Information Technology Firm, also in the EWMBA program.

The person responsible for the purported leak of an email from Moazzami suggests he was teaching more than 60 students at the point he resigned.

Moazzami has a long history with U.C. Berkeley, receiving a bachelor of science degree – with highest honors – in electrical engineering and computer science from the school; then a master’s degree and PhD in the same subjects, before obtaining an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

He began his career working in research and development for IBM and Motorola, according to Haas.

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