New Kelley Dean Likely To Be Insider

Indiana University’s Kelley Direct Online MBA tops the Princeton Review 2021 ranking, the fifth consecutive No. 1 win in this ranking

Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business has all but ruled out an outside successor to Dean Ash Soni. The university is launching what it is calling an “internal search” only open to “current tenured, full-professor faculty” at the school. The search will launch in December with the goal to name a successor by April of next year.

Kelley School of Business Dean Ash Soni

With active B-school dean searches underway at Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Duke, NYU, and UCLA, the decision to go inside follows a two-year appointment of Soni. Soni was asked to step in after an earlier broader dean search failed to produce an acceptable candidate. That search began in September of 2022 after Idalene “Idie” Kesner stepped down in July of that year. Soni, formerly executive associate dean, served as interim dean until his two-year appointment in April of 2023.

The university’s earlier external search was led by a 16-member search committee and assisted by headhunters Isaacson, Miller. This time around a new search committee will be chaired by John D. Ciorciari, dean of IU’s Lugar School of Global and International Studies. The group will include unnamed faculty, along with staff, student representatives, and a member of the Kelley Dean’s Council. The earlier search panel was led by Anastasia (Stacy) Morrone, the dean of the university’s School of Education.

TWO MOST LIKELY SUCCESSORS: PATRICK HOPKINS OR JULIE MANNING MAGID

Though the university says that Kelley School faculty will be able to nominate themselves or their peers for the deanship, two obvious candidates have already been put in place. With Soni’s appointment as permanent dean, two vice deans were named: Patrick Hopkins, executive associate dean for academic programs, gained a broader role at the school’s main campus in Bloomington, while Julie Manning Magid, executive associate dean for Indianapolis, assumed a new position in the school’s satellite campus.

Patrick Hopkins, vice deans at the Kelley School of Business

In all likelihood, the university will go with either Hopkins or Magid to succeed Soni, unless either candidate decides not to pursue the role. Hopkins may well have the edge, given the increasingly prominent role he has played at the school since being named vice dean. He has been directly involved in the school’s recent decision to launch a Kelley Full-Time +Flex MBA Program, that allows students to do their first year on campus and then complete their degree online. He also has played a key role in guiding the explosion in applications to Kelley’s undergraduate business program.

Hopkins has spent nearly 30 years of his professional life at Kelley, after earning his PhD in accounting from the University of Texas in Austin. He joined Kelley as a full-time accounting professor in 1995 and has since held several leadership roles, as chair of graduate accounting programs and chair of Kelley’s large undergraduate program. For nine months before his promotion to vice dean, Hopkins served as executive associate dean for academic programs.

A BIG OPPORTUNITY TO LEAD A MAJOR COMPREHENSIVE BUSINESS SCHOOL

Julie Manning Magid, vice deans at the Kelley School

Magid, a Georgetown and University of Michigan Law School grad, joined the school nearly nine years ago as a venture fellow and then a professor of business law. For the past seven years before her vice deanship, she has also served as the executive and academic director of the Tobias Leadership Center. Magid was e

The Kelley deanship is one of the biggest opportunities for a viable candidate, given the school’s budget, size, scope, and program portfolio. With an annual budget of $230 million, Kelley boasts more than 133,000 living alumni and a total enrollment of more than 15,000 students and 329 faculty members at IU Bloomington, IU Indianapolis, and online,

The school is frequently ranked among the top programs in the U.S. and globally. Its Kelley Direct online MBA program is consistently ranked No. 1 by U.S. News & World Report, Poets & Quants, and the Princeton Review.

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