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

The curriculum had been stuck for three years. Committees had met, surveys had been conducted, and the units had not moved. Then a new associate dean walked in, assembled a team of four faculty members, told them to go as wild as they possibly could, and gave them six weeks.

THE REDESIGN

When Shivani Shukla took on the associate dean role for undergraduate programs at USF’s School of Management, the business core stood at 52 units out of a 128-unit degree – a ratio that left students little room to explore, double major, pursue internships, or accelerate toward graduate study. The effort to reduce it had been underway in various forms since August 2021, with minimal progress to show for three years of meetings and deliberations.

Shukla’s approach was different. She assembled a team of four faculty members and gave them an unusual mandate.

“Go wild,” she told them. “What is the wildest thing you could come up with? The most ridiculous thing. Let’s do it all. Let’s go from ridiculous to the same – let’s consider that to be our spectrum and where do we land?”
The team spent six weeks in what Shukla describes as a sprint – a deliberate borrowing from the agile development methodology that defines the Bay Area’s tech workforce. They emerged with a proposal. Then came the faculty meeting.

“The faculty were like, ‘What is all that?’ Okay, explain everything, let’s talk,” Shukla tells P&Q. “It was such a good session because they were presenting their thoughts and there was so much dialogue and pushback.” She told the four faculty to hold their ground. She told the rest to attack and defend. “Let’s see what happens,” she says.

What happened – over multiple faculty meetings, online office hours for those who couldn’t attend in person, and personal conversations that Shukla had individually with every faculty member in the school – was a unanimous vote in favor of the redesign.

“It was wonderful,” she says. “That’s such a great way to actually have these things develop more organically as opposed to top down.”

THE UNANIMOUS VOTE

Grossman, who helped shepherd the vote, calls it the hardest thing he’s been involved in professionally. He received what he describes, with quiet pride, as his first good citizenship award for doing it.

The resulting curriculum cut the core from 52 units to 40 – a reduction that freed students to pursue electives, double majors, or accelerate into graduate programs. It also represented a philosophical shift: business content moved earlier in the degree, so students began engaging with faculty and business ideas from their first semester rather than spending two years in general education before arriving at the school proper.

Crucially, Grossman notes, the school quietly extended its reach at the same time. By taking ownership of university-wide core requirements – including the math requirement previously outsourced to the mathematics department – the school effectively taught more than the raw unit count suggested. “We sort of double-dipped a little bit,” he says. “We didn’t really tell our colleagues in arts and sciences about that. We just kind of quietly did it.”

The motivation for front-loading business content, Shukla explains, came directly from students. “Students unequivocally said that we would like to take major classes sooner,” she says, so they could begin applying for internships and jobs earlier. “You can’t sidestep” finance, accounting, and the fundamentals of business, she acknowledges – but by compressing the required core and making it more intentional, students could reach depth sooner and still have room to explore.

For USF’s significant population of first-generation college students, that acceleration had financial implications as well. “For them to have a good job right after college is actually essential,” Shukla says. “To take care of them and think about their finances is kind of part of the student centricity motto that we had.”

The same redesign created the conditions for USF’s 3+1 accelerated program – a pathway allowing strong undergraduate students to complete both a BSBA and a Master’s in Management degree in four years, saving money and entering the job market with a graduate credential.

When the AACSB peer review team arrived, they asked Shukla how the school had managed to get the core redesign done without years of entrenched resistance. “The reviewers said this is a hard thing to do, how did you all manage?” she recalls. Her answer was that it wasn’t one thing or one semester. It was years of preparation, followed by a willingness to stop deliberating and act. “Everybody would always say, ‘Let’s take more time, let’s think about it more,'” she says. “We were just a bunch of people who argued and said, ‘No. Let’s not think about it too much. Let’s just go with it. Fail fast. Learn. Get back up and try again.’”

THE EVIDENCE

What a transformation looks like on paper and what it produces in practice are not always the same thing. At USF, the evidence is gathering in ways that range from the measurable to the anecdotal – and some of the most telling signs are small.

In Shukla’s Analytics for Good course – a class focused on using technology to address civic and government problems – she abandoned the traditional assignment structure after watching AI render the old model obsolete. She gave students a new mandate: build something. At the end of the semester, one team’s work was reviewed by government officials who attended the final presentations. The feedback was strong enough that the team registered a limited liability company within a month of the course ending. They are now building a procurement tool for government agencies.

“I think that’s what education will eventually become,” Shukla says. “You’re now being evaluated at a much more higher metacognitive level. Because so much of the drab work that we used to make them do is automated.”

Grossman has reached a similar conclusion from a different angle. He recently ran his signature spreadsheet case – a complex, multi-layered analytical problem from Virginia’s Darden School of Business that he has used for years to teach students to think like analysts – through Claude, Anthropic’s AI system, with a brief prompt. The result was a seven-tab spreadsheet that solved the case at the level of a 90th-percentile student. It identified the optimization problem embedded in the case, ran the optimization, noted that it could not access Solver because there is no API connection, and provided instructions for doing it manually. It flagged a sensitivity analysis. When Grossman found one error and queried it, the AI offered a justification he found unconvincing. “That was wrong. You don’t get to change that. That’s data.”

His conclusion is not that the course is obsolete – it is that the course has to change. “We’ve been claiming we’re training students to think like analysts. We take liberal arts students who don’t have a science or math or tech background and we train them to think clearly. And they love it. A lot of people have been told they’re bad at math. And they might be bad at that, but they’re not bad at thinking.” The mechanics of that thinking, he says, are now automated. The question of how to develop and evaluate expertise in a world where the artifact of expertise can be generated by a machine is, he believes, “the central question for schools.”

THE MONEY FOLLOWS

On the development side, the transformation narrative has translated into fundraising results that Patricia Dassios, USF’s director of development and herself a School of Management alumna, describes as more than double the historical baseline. Over the past four years, the school has raised $22 million – an average of $5.5 million annually, compared to roughly half that during the previous decade’s campaign. Alumni engagement increased 50% year-over-year during the school’s Centennial in 2025.

“The transformation narrative has resonated strongly with donors,” Dassios tells P&Q. “The school’s strongest supporters – leaders from the business community – have responded particularly well to the clarity of Dean Otgo’s vision, strategy, and execution.” Donors, she notes, understand that higher education is facing structural headwinds across the board. What moves them is not the absence of difficulty but the quality of the response to it. “They are focused on whether we are making disciplined choices, reallocating resources strategically, and executing against a clear, forward-looking plan.”

Dassios opens every donor conversation with a version of the same question: “What will be your legacy to USF?” She asks it after sharing her own answer – she has established an endowed scholarship for the School of Management, and as a scholarship recipient herself, she says giving is paying forward what the school gave her.

THE NEXT ASK

The school’s three current fundraising priorities – a reimagined facility, a Center for Internships and Career Advancement, and an Experiential Learning Lab – are all pointed at the same practical question that Joy McGowan, chair of the Dean’s Circle Advisory Board, says prospective students and families are now asking. “They are asking very practical questions,” McGowan says. “Is this worth the investment? Will I be prepared for the real world? Will I leave with skills, confidence, relationships, and opportunity?”

McGowan, a USF alumna who has observed the school from the advisory board through the enrollment crisis and the transformation that followed, describes the mood among board members during the difficult years as “concerned, but not panicked.” The Dean’s Circle, she notes, is composed of people who have led organizations through real business cycles. They understand seasons. What changed as the transformation unfolded was that the board had something concrete to engage with – execution, not just aspiration.

She calls Otgo “the joyful futurist” – someone who can face hard things directly and still see possibility. “That is not a small thing,” McGowan tells P&Q.

“The transformation was needed, and it is still unfolding,” she continues. “Standing still would have been the bigger risk.”

She draws a distinction that she believes is at the heart of what USF has built – a distinction between training and formation. “Training builds skills,” she says. “Formation shapes how those skills are used and why.” That distinction, she argues, is what it means to offer a Jesuit business education – and it is what the peer review team recognized when they called USF a model.

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