Former Brown Provost Named Dean Of MIT Sloan

After a two-year stint as dean of Apple University, Richard ‘Rick’ Locke is returning to academia. The 65-year-old former provost of Brown University has been named dean of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, effective July 1.

For Locke, the new leadership challenge represents a return to roots. From 1988 to 2013, he had been a faculty member, a department head, and a deputy dean of MIT Sloan. After leaving MIT, Locke was a senior leader at Brown University, including seven and a half years as Brown’s provost. Since early 2023, he has been dean of Apple University, an educational training unit within Apple Inc. focused on educating the company’s employees on leadership, management, and the company’s culture and organization.

“I am thrilled to be returning to MIT Sloan,” says Locke in a statement. “It is a special place, with its world-class faculty, innovative research and educational programs, and close-knit community, all within the MIT ecosystem.”

SLOAN DEANSHIP ONE OF SEVERAL PROMINENT BUSINESS DEANSHIPS CURRENTLY VACANT

In making the announcement, MIT said it had conducted an extensive search for the position, evaluating internal and external candidates over the last several months. The executive search firm Isaacson, Miller assisted the search committee which was co-chaired by Sloan Professors Kate Kellogg and Andrew W. Lo.

The Sloan deanship is one of several prominent leadership roles currently unfilled in business education. Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, and New York University’s School of Business are among many schools searching for new deans. A so-called M7 business school, a designation reflecting the school’s prestige and status, Sloan has slumped in recent MBA rankings. In the newest Poets&Quants composite ranking, Sloan’s MBA program placed 13th after a 14th place finish in 2023. Only three years ago in 2022, MIT Sloan’s MBA program was ranked sixth best in the U.S. The slide has occurred in the aftermath of a social media thrashing the school received from several international MBA students.

No less troublesome, nearly a quarter of Sloan’s MBA graduates last year failed to gain employment three months after graduation. Even as the school’s MBA placement rates are its worst in many years, overshadowing even last year’s dismal numbers, they were accompanied by declines in median salary, average signing bonus, average other compensation, and both median and mean overall compensation compared to previous classes.

Offer rates were solidly in the mid- to high 90s and acceptance rates in the low to mid-90s from 2018 through 2022 at MIT Sloan. In fact, before last year, you had to go back to 2013 to find a sub-90% job acceptance result for Sloanies. Now it has happened in back-to back years: In 2023, as employment offers fell to 90.2%, accepts dropped to 86.9%; and this year, offers dropped further to 85.1%, and accepts fell nearly 10 more points to 77.2%.

Besides these obvious issues that require his attention, Locke’s most urgent challenge is to lead Sloan in addressing artificial intelligence. Among several challenges, the university singled out AI in its spec for the new dean. According to MIT,  AI is “already disrupting and transforming management education and presenting challenges to existing educational models.”MIT Sloan has a significant opportunity to innovate and establish itself as the leading business school in this emerging field,” the specs for the job concluded. “The new Dean will work closely with MIT Sloan faculty and staff to ensure the School is at the forefront of curricular and pedagogical innovation—reevaluating and adjusting curriculum as needed—to stay abreast of industry trends, innovative teaching, and advancements in the relationship between business and emerging technologies.”

SLOAN BOASTS EIGHT DEGREE PROGRAMS FOR ROUGHLY 1,600 STUDENTS

Locke succeeds David Schmittlein who stepped down in February 2024 after a nearly 17-year tenure. Since his departure, Sloan Professor has been serving as the interim dean and will continue in the role until Locke begins.

The MIT Sloan job is one of the plum leaderships roles in business education. Though the school has only 115 tenure-track faculty, Sloan boasts an extensive educational portfolio, including eight degree programs for roughly 1,600 students. Sloan increased its combined MBA/LGO from 790 students in 2007 to over 850 students (combined two years), launched a Master of Finance that has grown from 26 to 125 students, and created a highly ranked Master in Business Analytics program which, along with the Master of Finance, is now among the most competitive degree programs at MIT.

The school has developed 50 different Executive Education offerings that enroll 5,000 students annually, retooled its Sloan Fellows MBA, launched a new Master of Science in Management Studies that particularly serves its international business school partners with joint degrees, strengthened its PhD program, and redesigned its undergraduate program. MIT Sloan now offers three undergraduate major options in management, finance, and business analytics, which collectively engage 204 majors and 45 minors, with 44 percent of MIT undergraduate students taking at least one Course 15 class. In addition, the Executive MBA was launched in 2010 with a class of 62 students. That program has grown to include 251 students in two cohorts.

‘IT WILL BE EXCITING AND FUN TO WORK WITH GREAT COLLEAGUES’

In his statement, Locke says the school’s assets “give MIT Sloan an opportunity to chart the future — to shape how new technologies will reconfigure industries and careers, how new enterprises will be created and run, how individuals will work and live, and how national economies will develop and adapt. It will be exciting and fun to work with great colleagues and to help lead the school to its next phase of global prominence and impact.”

A political scientist by training, Locke has conducted high-profile research on labor practices in global supply chains, among other topics. His career has also included efforts to bring together stakeholders, from multinational firms to supply-chain workers, in an effort to upgrade best practices in business.

MIT said that Locke is “widely known for a vigorous work ethic, a humane manner around co-workers, and a leadership outlook that blends idealism about civic engagement with realism about global challenges.”

EARNED HIS PHD AT MIT IN POLITICAL SCIENCE

Locke received his BA from Wesleyan University and an MA in education from the University of Chicago. He earned his doctorate in political science at MIT, writing a dissertation about local politics and industrial change in Italy, under the supervision of now-Institute Professor Suzanne Berger.

Locke joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor of international management, was promoted in 1993 to an associate professor of management and political science, and earned tenure in 1996. In 2000, he was named the Alvin J. Siteman Professor of Entrepreneurship, becoming a full professor in 2001.

In 2010, Locke took on a new role at MIT, heading the Department of Political Science, a position he held through 2013; he was also given a new endowed professorship, the Class of 1922 Professor of Political Science and Management. During the same time frame, Locke also served as deputy dean at MIT Sloan, from 2009 through 2010, and then again from 2012 through 2013.

LEFT MIT TO ULTIMATELY BECOME BROWN’S PROVOST 

Locke moved to Brown in order to take the position of director of the Thomas J. Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. In 2015, he was named Brown’s provost, the university’s chief academic officer and budget officer. During his nearly eight-year stint as Brown provost. While at Brown, Locke was credited with elevating the profile of the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, building a foundation to usher in historic fundraising for student scholarships and faculty research, and working with other administrative leaders to double faculty diversity.

When he left to join Apple two years ago, Locke called it “the opportunity of a lifetime. There is no company in the world that has been more impactful at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts than Apple,” Locke then said. “To be able to bring my years of experience, passion and curiosity to support the development of the incredibly talented people at Apple is the opportunity of a lifetime.”

In a letter to the MIT community, MIT Provost Cynthia Barnhart praised Locke’s “transformative career” and noted how she and the search committee agree “that Rick’s depth of experience makes him a once-in-a-generation leader who will ‘hit the ground sprinting’” as MIT Sloan’s next dean.

“The committee and I were impressed by his vision for removing frictions that slow research efforts, his exceptional track record of raising substantial funds to support academic communities, and his strong grasp of and attentiveness to the interests and needs of MIT Sloan’s constituencies,” says Barnhart in a statement. Locke will report to Barnhart.

DON’T MISS: MEET MIT SLOAN’S MBA CLASS OF 2026 or MIT SLOAN MBAS HIT BREAKING POINT WITH ADMINISTRATION