Wharton Names New Dean: Emory’s Erika James

The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania announced today (February 26) that Erika James will become the school’s next dean, effective July 1. James, 50, who has been dean at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School since July 2014, becomes the first person of color and the first woman dean in Wharton’s 139-year history.

The announcement concludes an eight-month search to replace Geoffrey Garrett, who will take over as dean of the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business in July. It is not the first time that Wharton has gone to Emory for a dean. Before the Australian-born Garrett got the job, the University of Pennsylvania had turned to Tom Robertson who also had been dean of the Goizueta School when he was plucked from Emory and into Wharton in 2014.

“Erika is an award-winning scholar and teacher and a strong, proven leader who serves as dean of the Goizueta Business School at Emory University,” Penn President Amy Gutmann said in an announcement from the school. “A passionate and visible champion of the power of business and business education to positively transform communities locally, nationally, and globally, she is exceptionally well prepared to lead Wharton into the next exciting chapter of its storied history.”

JAMES: HIGHLY ACCOMPLISHED, POLISHED AND CHARISMATIC

In choosing James, Wharton has selected a consummate professional, a highly accomplished and polished business school leader. Always impeccably dressed, James is both charismatic and smoothly articulate. She brings to the job a deep knowledge of the challenges facing business education gained from both her deanship at Goizueta but also a stint as an associate dean of executive education at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. And James is probably the only dean ever to have been the subject of a case study which in 2008 described her as “a successful professional, a loving spouse, an adoring parent, physically fit, emotionally upbeat, socially polished, and seemingly cool, calm, and collected.” The case study explored the life and career of an associate professor.

Her academic and leadership experience will be tested at what is one of the top three business schools in the world. Wharton has more than 5,000 students across four-degree programs, including more than 2,600 business undergraduates and nearly 1,800 full-time MBA students. The standing faculty numbers 241 professors across ten departments, with another 243 non-standing full- and part-time faculty members. At Goizueta, currently ranked by Poets&Quants as having the 22nd best MBA in the U.S., two-year, full-time MBA enrollment is less than 350 students, while the two-year undergraduate program enrolls roughly 800, less than a third of the size of Wharton’s undergraduate student population.

With the hire, Wharton is making a commitment to innovation, diversity and inclusion. During her time as dean at Goizueta, James was instrumental in growing the school’s faculty base by 25% as well as building a new innovation and entrepreneurship lab that is designed to reach students from across Emory’s campus as well as the Atlanta startup community. James is further credited with boosting diversity in Goizueta’s faculty: She was awarded the Earl Hill Jr. Faculty Achievement and Diversity Award from the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management last May.

‘WE ARE SAD TO SEE HER GO BUT HAPPY FOR HER AT THE SAME TIME’

Reaction from some of James’ team members at Goizueta was one of sadness yet joy over the opportunity she has received. “We are excited for her and she is so deserving of this new role,” says Jaclyn Conner, an associate dean for the school’s executive MBA programs. “She has set us up extremely well. We are sad to see her go but happy for her at the same time.”

James’ appointment comes at a time when several of the most prominent female deans have recently moved on from their jobs to other duties. Sally Blount, the first woman to be dean of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, stepped down in 2018 after an eight-year run. Blount, who returned to the faculty, was succeeded by another woman, Francesca Cornelli, who had been the first female awarded tenure at the London Business School. Judy Olian, who had been dean of UCLA’s Anderson School of Management for 12 years, left in 2018 as well to become president of Quinnipiac University. But no woman, until James, has ever led a business school as highly ranked as Wharton. The last U.S. News & World Report ranking placed Wharton’s MBA program first in the nation, ahead of Stanford, Harvard and Chicago Booth.

“Erika has consistently and constructively drawn upon her own scholarship in the areas of leadership development, organizational behavior, gender and racial diversity, and crisis leadership,” Penn Provost Wendell Pritchett said in the school’s statement, “applying her own insights into human behavior to foster a work culture that allows people to thrive personally and professionally. She has led faculty and student workshops on such topics as unconscious bias and building trust across divides and has been engaged as a consultant by some of the nation’s largest and most prestigious firms.”

GOIZUETA POISED FOR CONTINUED SUCCESS AFTER JAMES’ LEADERSHIP

James apparently came up early in the search. The university did not announce its search committee, which was assisted by executive search firm Korn Ferry’s Kenneth Kring, until Sept. 10 of last year, three months after Dean Geoffrey Garrett publicly said he would be leaving Wharton for the deanship of USC’s Marshall School of Business. In a brief interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper, James said that she was invited to meet with the committee in the fall, after which she met with Penn President Amy Gutmann and Provost Wendell Pritchett.

James, who was at the beginning of her second five-year term at Goizueta, leaves the school in a good place. Last December, Goizueta received the largest gift in its history — a $30 million pledge from the Goizueta Foundation. Among other things, the gift will go directly to the creation of three initiatives with Goizueta’s name attached to each: a new state-of-the-art virtual classroom, a Goizueta Innovation Center, and the Roberto C. Goizueta Institute for Business and Society.

“We are a school that punches above our weight,” James said at the time of the announcement. Emory Goizueta’s endowment of about $140 million is the smallest among business schools with top-25 MBA programs. “We are well regarded and have learned to operate with our resources very wisely,” James added. “The gift gives us some cushion to allow us to innovate and experiment in ways we haven’t done so in the past.”

Prior to beginning her deanship at Goizueta, James was not only Darden’s associate dean of executive education; she also taught organizational and crisis leadership at Darden for more than a decade, gaining in the process rave reviews for her teaching abilities. Jeremey Shinewald, a Darden MBA graduate and founder of mbaMission, an MBA admissions consulting firm, recalls having James as a professor in her very first class at Darden. “She was an excellent prof and a really wonderful person,” he says. “Wharton has found a prize.”