Vanderbilt’s New Business School Dean On Building A New Florida Campus

Pretty much everyone agrees that the job of being a new business school dean can be grueling. You’ve got to do your listening tour with faculty, alumni, staff, and students. You have to hone your fundraising pitch. And you have to cultivate strong relationships with university overseers.

So when you add to this new. list the possibility of creating a new campus from scratch that would be 850 miles away, you’ve added an entirely new dimension to the job. That’s the ambitious challenge confronting Tom Steenburgh, who in July celebrated his first complete year as dean of Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management in Nashville, Tenn. He has signed up to build a new campus for Vanderbilt centered around business education offerings in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Recruited from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, Steenburgh seems to relish the challenge of creating a satellite campus for Vanderbilt. “For me,” he says, “it’s exactly what I wanted. This growth mindset. Let’s go do something interesting. You are dean for a very short time. Ten years is not that long. When you talk about doing something big you better get at it quickly so you want to be at a place that wants to do something special.”

A SATELLITE CAMPUS IN WEST PALM BEACH COULD REQUIRE $700 MILLION IN INVESTMENT

How special? It would require as much as $700 million in investment to get the campus off the ground. It would employ 80 to 90 faculty members and roughly 1,000 students earning master’s and doctorate degrees.  Vanderbilt’s satellite campus would be located along South Tamarind Avenue on the western edge of downtown, on five acres owned by Palm Beach County and two acres owned by the city of West Palm Beach.

Steenburgh believes Vanderbilt is ideally suited for the area. “There has been a huge flight of capital south over the past 20 years,” he reasons. “A campus in Florida would give our school growth consistent with our brand. We are in a city that is on fire economically. This would be a similar situation with huge economic growth. There are consistencies around that growth like real estate. We should have a program in real estate to take advantage of two markets where capital is flowing in recent years.

“Another exciting thing is that many finance jobs have moved south to Florida and there is a lack of talent in the area. There isn’t enough supply relative to the demand for talent. We want to participate in that. And then the thing that is not obvious is that finance jobs are all over the map. Some are straight dead red finance and some are more technical like financial engineering and data science. We are starting a College of Connected Computing and it would be an important part of what they do and could create programs at the intersection of finance and data science. And we would do an EMBA program or a flexible MBA program. When you look at opportunities from the business school perspective, being in a location that has a growing economy and having it be consistent with your brand, why wouldn’t you look at it?”

‘WE DON’T WANT TO BE ANYTHING SECOND-RATE. BUSINESS SCHOOLS ARE EXPENSIVE’

Steenburgh cautions that there are many hurdles to the new campus. “There is a lot that has to happen before this goes forward. We would have to raise a lot of money and there’s reason to believe that can happen down there. Most fundraising campaigns have a quiet period and this is not that. Within 18 months to a year, we will know exactly where we will be. While there is no public number, hundreds of millions of dollars need to be raised. We don’t want to do anything second-rate. Business schools are expensive.” 

Bloomberg has reported that wealthy Floridians, including Stephen Ross, whose name adorns the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, have already gained commitments for about $100 million contingent on  Vanderbilt securing the land. Vanderbilt trustee Jon Winkelried, CEO of asset management firm TPG Capital; and Cody Crowell, a Vanderbilt grad and managing partner at Frisbie Group real estate investment firm in Palm Beach, have been credited with coming up with the idea of bringing Vanderbilt to town. But the total fundraising to get the campus up and running could well approach $700 million.

The plan follows a failed effort by the University of Florida to locate a campus in downtown West Palm Beach that would have offered graduate work in business, engineering, and law, with a focus on artificial intelligence, fintech, and cybersecurity. That deal collapsed last year over naming rights after UF couldn’t come to terms with Palm Beach billionaire Jeff Greene on his donation of five acres of what would have been a 12-acre campus. Instead, UF decided to build a graduate campus in downtown Jacksonville.

VANDERBILT CHANCELLOR DANIEL DIERMEIER: ‘WHAT IS YOUR MOONSHOT IDEA?’

Undaunted, Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier has forged ahead. “We are going to take some big swings at things,” says Steenburgh. “Florida gets exactly to the growth mindset. Owen is a smaller school with a high-touch MBA. People love the school. The small class size and intimate setting are what people value. So this would give us important growth.”

Owen’s annual two-year MBA intake is about 160 students, with a much smaller Executive MBA cohort, and a portfolio of master’s degrees in healthcare management, accounting, finance, and marketing. The school’s full-time MBA program is ranked 21st best in the U.S. by Poets&Quants, up six places from a year earlier.

“I could not be happier,” adds Steenburgh. “I started looking for a place with growth opportunities. I did my PhD at Yale when it was just transforming itself from a public policy degree to a business school. The school has had amazing growth since then. Vanderbilt as a university is growth-minded. ‘Dare to grow’ is Daniel’s mantra. Daniel asks, ‘What is your moonshot idea?” He is so gung-ho and supportive of the business school. I am really lucky. I thought I would get to a place that would want to grow and be big. It’s all there. Nashville as a city is booming. We have a really compelling narrative about being the modern university and modern business school that people want to be a part of. If someone is building a legacy for themselves. they are going to want to be associated with it.”

Steenburgh left Darden after spending 11 years at the school. While a master teacher in marketing, he held a variety of leadership roles over those years, including senior associate deanships for executive education and faculty development as well as senior associate dean for Darden’s flagship residential MBA program for three years from 2020 to 2023. Before joining Darden in 2012, Steenburgh taught at the Harvard Business School for nine years. Before entering academia, he spent eight years at the Xerox Corp.

A NEW MISSION STATEMENT

Steenburgh earned his PhD in marketing at Yale in 2004, after gaining a master’s degree in statistics at the University of Michigan in 1992 and an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Boston University in 1990.

During his first year as Owen dean, Steenburgh led a revision of the school’s mission statement, moved an undergraduate minor in business to the business school, and revamped Owen’s executive education offerings which resulted in a tripling of the school’s open enrollment programs. “There was nothing wrong with the old mission statement–‘World class education at a personal scale.’ What I wanted us to do was to think aspirationally about what we wanted to do. We just finished it up and the new mission is ‘Creating opportunities to discover, grow, and thrive in business and beyond.’ It’s the aspiration to do something so special for a student that they can get well beyond where they thought they could get. That is our focus. It will be making these connections for people and opening their eyes to real opportunities. That is the idea. How do you get into those spaces where things really take off? If I could be thought of as anything at the end, I would want to be the high potential growth school, where you can self-actualize and become the greatest version of yourself.”

To Steenburgh, that means strengthening a focus on AI, real estate, entrepreneurship, healthcare, and the creative economy.

“We moved the university’s undergraduate business minor to the business school.  It has been in existence for seven years but it was governed through a university committee. Vanderbilt is a liberal arts school so there is no professional college in the undergraduate space. The kids get places at McKinsey and Goldman and they need more business education than they have today. We moved the minor over to Owen and Kelly Goldsmith and Gary Kimble are running the program and they are doing a curriculum review.

‘THE JOB MARKET HAS MOVED WAY UP’

“Companies expect that you will know something. They are not going to spend the first year of your employment teaching you everything you need to know. The job market has moved way up. For I-banking jobs, you interview in the spring of your sophomore year. This summer, with the help of a generous parent, we put in a Wall Street prep program and will have a series of workshops next fall. So when you interview in the spring of your sophomore year you can compete with anyone.”

A rebuilding of the school’s executive education portfolio led to the significant increase in enrollment. “Some of that is COVID hangover,” he says. “We need to explore alternative formats like a flexible MBA and make sense of how that looks between Nashville and Florida. We will start on the intersection of data science or AI in finance before we get to South Florida. We can collaborate within the university on that. Philosophically it is similar to Yale. Yale’s School of Management recognized that it is part of an amazing university and took advantage of it. The future of business is more collaboration with other departments, including the College of Data Science. If you are small, you look for friends and I am looking for friends and am in an environment that rewards that.”

His biggest surprise since becoming dean of Owen is the lack of a big surprise. “I had an uncle who left Xerox to run a smaller company as the CEO and he had to restate earnings in his first three months because of malfeasance,” recalls Steenburgh. “He stuck it out and went back to zero. You don’t know when you jump until you are there. This is everything I thought it would be.”

DON’T MISS: MEET VANDERBILT OWEN’S CLASS OF 2025 or VANDERBILT HIRES UVA DARDEN STAR AS NEW DEAN