A New Dean At Tuck, A New ‘Refined Vision’ For The School

Stell Hall at the Tuck School of Business

A NEW REQUIRED GLOBAL EXPERIENTIAL OPPORTUNITY FOR TUCKIES

The program, dubbed TuckGO (for global opportunities), offers up four options to satisfy the requirement approved in Slaughter’s first month as dean: a first-year project, an on-site consulting assignment, an international exchange with a partner school, or a student-initiated project that gains approval from the faculty. This March, two Tuck professors will lead a ten-day trip for students to Cuba where they will meet with officials of the country’s Central Bank, its Ministry of the Economy and Planning, and Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment.

“The genesis of it was from the students,” says Slaughter, in an interview with Poets&Quants on a trip to San Francisco. “Four years ago, a group of second years came to me and asked us to think about what global means at Tuck. One of them pointed out that the only international experience we had was a ten-day course in partnership with IE Business School in Spain. I immediately thought that was a refinement opportunity for us so we’re building a suite of inter-cultural awareness sessions and more global opportunities.”

Slaughter is also expanding from one to four the number of student-managed funds on campus. In addition to Tuck’s current mini-hedge fund for public equities, he plans to add one for social venture capital that would fund double- and triple-bottom line enterprises, a venture capital fund, and another pool of money to co-invest in private equity transactions.

NO ELBOW-THROWING, ALPHA DOGS WANTED AT TUCK

The changes have more to do with upping the experiential learning options on campus than it does with any attempt to acquire more heft in the financial area. “If a person is a real alpha dog and wants to throw elbows, there are other business schools for them,” he says. “Our students self-select to be at Tuck. The type of students we get and the size of our school enables the most aspirational, invigorating leadership experience. Trust is an integral part of this. If we added a zero to each class size at Tuck, it would be a lot harder to add that commitment to the school.”

The trim, earnest economist who sports a toothy smile and a still boyish look, knows Dartmouth inside and out, having made the college his professional home for 21 years. A Notre Dame grad who earned his PhD in economics at MIT in 1994, Slaughter wasn’t so sure he wanted to be an academic. But the son a sales executive for a specialty metals company in Minneapolis ultimately turned down an offer to work with McKinsey & Co. and instead headed not that far from Cambridge to Dartmouth College.

He joined the economics department, stayed for eight years, and then was recruited on the Tuck faculty by Dean Danos in 2002. During his 13 years in Tuck classrooms, as well as associate dean stints for both the faculty and the MBA program, roughly a third of the 9,759 living alumni at Tuck have passed through the school. Many of them know Slaughter well, having been in his Global Economics for Managers or Leadership in the Global Economy courses.