One B-School’s Journey From ‘Double Secret Probation’ To Model For The World

The exit meeting is the moment at the end of a multi-day site visit when AACSB International reviewers – accreditors who set the global standard for business education – deliver their verdict before filing their formal report. It is typically measured, procedural, careful.

What the accreditors said this month at the University of San Francisco was none of those things.

“Light years ahead,” they told a group which included the president of USF, his provost, and the dean of the School of Management, describing the B-school’s progress since its last review.

They called the school’s work on societal impact an exemplar of what AACSB seeks. They described USF as a model of Jesuit business education. But it was what they said next that may have mattered most.

They turned to the president and provost and told them their School of Management needed support. The faculty and staff had done an extraordinary amount of work in three to four years – but if the university kept asking them to cut more and more, AACSB officials warned, the school would not be able to sustain the momentum it had just generated. People were at risk of burning out.

“It was great,” says Dean Otgontsetseg Erhemjamts, known throughout the USF community as Dean Otgo, recalling the exit meeting. She pauses, then adds: “They were both kind of in awe and also kind of surprised at the speed with which we were able to do these things.”

THE ANNOUNCEMENT

The official ratification came shortly after, when the AACSB International Board of Directors voted to extend accreditation in the first clean review for the school since 2011. In an email to the School of Management community, USF President Salvador D. Aceves called it a moment “of great pride in the history of the School of Management and of this university.” He singled out the school’s “transparent and courageous navigation of a genuinely difficult financial environment,” its “landmark undergraduate curriculum redesign,” and its “exceptional student outcomes.”

What Aceves did not detail in that letter – and what the peer review team’s language only hints at – is the full story of how a small Jesuit business school on the edge of a recovering city pulled off one of the more remarkable institutional transformations in recent business education history. That story involves a once-in-a-generation structural gamble, a faculty culture war quietly won, a unanimous vote that surprised almost everyone, and the slow, unglamorous work of turning an organization that had drifted into one that runs like it means it.

It also involves a dean who describes herself, not entirely in jest, as “not many deans are stupid like me to go all in.”

THE RECKONING

By the time Otgo arrived at USF in the summer of 2022, the School of Management had been losing ground for years. Undergraduate enrollment had fallen by roughly a third since 2019. Graduate enrollment was down by a comparable margin. The school’s location in San Francisco – an asset in better times – had become a liability, given the city’s heavy reliance on international students and its exposure to the political and pandemic-driven disruptions that had hammered that population.

“The dean’s job is resource allocation,” Otgo told Poets&Quants in 2024, when P&Q first reported on the transformation underway at USF. “If you have declining enrollment, that means your finances or budgets are also declining, so we have to do more with less.”

What she did not say then – and says more plainly now – is how close to the edge the school was operating throughout those years.

“All four years of my deanship, I had to cut budgets all the time,” she tells P&Q now. What she is proud of is how those cuts were made. “We managed cutting budgets without laying off anybody or non-renewals. Keeping the important jobs – faculty jobs, staff jobs. And trying to innovate. Not just survive, but also kind of make lemonade out of a lemon.”

THE LONG VIEW

Thomas Grossman has watched the school through many seasons. A faculty member and former associate dean who arrived at USF more than two decades ago and is retiring in May 2027, he has lived through multiple AACSB cycles and remembers what the previous ones looked like from the inside.

“The last 2011 review?” he tells P&Q, laughing. “I jokingly called it ‘double secret probation.'”

The school had been placed on a one-year review – the accreditor’s most serious warning short of revocation. The complaints, Grossman concedes, were legitimate.

“We did not have a meaningful strategic planning process. We were not tracking intellectual contributions, much less really getting people to do things.” The school was asleep, he says. “Only every five or six years you kind of get through it, you’re exhausted, you fall, you collapse because you’re exhausted. And then you go back to sleep.”

The story of how USF stopped going back to sleep begins, in a sense, in January 2023, when Otgo and school leadership convened a day-long workshop facilitated by faculty from Stanford University’s Design School. In the room were USF faculty, staff, students, representatives from local nonprofits, members of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, and a representative from Mayor London Breed’s office.

The morning session posed a deliberately uncomfortable question: if USF’s School of Management were to fail within five years, what would be the reason? Three vulnerabilities surfaced. The school might fail to build meaningful industry partnerships. Its curriculum might not be agile enough to respond to what the market needed. And it might not be student-centric enough to attract and retain the students it needed to survive.

Those three diagnoses became the blueprint for everything that followed.

THE BET

The most radical decision Otgo made – the one that drew the most skepticism from faculty when we first reported on it in 2024 – was the elimination of the school’s seven academic departments in favor of three thematic “impact areas”: Sustainable Management Education, Racial and Social Justice in the Business Community, and Digital Transformation.

It was, by any measure, a structural gamble. Academic departments are among the most durable organisms in higher education. They are the unit of identity, the unit of budget, the unit of political power. Proposing to eliminate them is not just an administrative decision. It is a provocation.

“People were freaked out about that,” Otgo said in 2024.

Grossman, who was a department chair at the time, offers a more clinical postmortem. The real driver, he says, was managerial – not philosophical. The school had shrunk. When he arrived two decades ago, it had roughly 50 full-time faculty and no departments. After a merger with another USF school, the faculty grew toward 90 and departments became a practical necessity. By the time Otgo arrived, the faculty had contracted back toward 50. “With 50, we can do it with staff handling things,” Grossman says. At that size, the department structure was generating costs – chair compensation, administrative overhead, the perpetual drag of scheduling and turf protection – without generating commensurate value.

“Human beings come together in groups with shared interests, and they sort of defend their turf,” Grossman says. “Academics are famous for defending their turf.” But with one or two exceptions, he says, the resistance softened over time. “People were able to be much more relaxed about what was going to happen, and able to be more flexible looking forward to a future that was going to be different.”

HOW IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

Part of what made the transition work, he says, was the staff. Long-serving administrators who had spent years cultivating relationships with individual faculty – who were well-respected, well-liked, and trusted – were able to step into significantly larger roles once the department chair structure was removed. And part of what made it work, he adds more bluntly, was attrition. “A bunch of people retired. And people who needed to retire, maybe they retired.” The people who “actively don’t play well with others,” as he puts it, have all departed. “It’s huge,” he says.

Behind all of it, Grossman argues, was something more fundamental than any structural innovation: the slow, difficult work of changing faculty culture. “At the heart of it, really – this is true for all things in academia – the heart of it is the slow work of changing faculty culture. Getting faculty to support a culture of more accountability and more reporting and more sharing.”

He gives credit where he says it is due. “The groundwork was laid before Dean Otgo got here,” he says, “but she really focused on establishing that stuff.” And he singles out a colleague – Associate Dean for Graduate Programs Richard Stackman – as deserving specific recognition for building the strategic planning process that became a cornerstone of the AACSB review.

“Most strategic plans are nonsense,” Grossman says with characteristic bluntness. “They’re just a box-checking activity. They go sit on some shelf somewhere. No one ever refers to them.” USF’s, he says, is different. “It’s the first one I’ve ever seen where I actually want to refer to it. It’s short. It’s crisp. And we didn’t let people get their little weasel words in.”

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