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

The peer review team’s praise was specific, not ceremonial. They did not simply say the school had met the standards. They said it was showing other schools what meeting the standards actually looks like. That is a different statement – and the people who run USF’s School of Management know exactly what it implies.

THE VERDICT

AACSB’s societal impact standard is relatively new. Introduced in the 2020 standards revision, it asks business schools to demonstrate that their work – research, curriculum, community engagement – connects to outcomes beyond the institution itself. It is, Otgo says, a standard that many schools are still struggling to interpret.

“Common approach is kind of like a taking-an-inventory approach,” she says, describing what she has seen when serving on peer review teams herself. “‘We have like five papers on climate change, we have two papers on income inequality’ – so you kind of put them together and say, ‘see, like we have all these things going on, so that has societal impact.’ It doesn’t have this kind of deliberate, intentional, strategic approach to it.”

USF’s approach was different. The three impact areas – launched in lieu of departments – were not just administrative categories. They were designed to pull faculty across disciplinary lines, to connect research to curriculum, and to involve students directly in faculty work.

“We are not just saying we’re encouraging interdisciplinary research,” Otgo says. “This is actually incentivizing people working across disciplines. And not just faculty – they’re working with students. And it should have a curricular component to it, not just your research.”

WHAT THE REVIEWERS SAW

That integration is what the peer review team saw. And when they called it an exemplar, Otgo believes they were making a statement not just about USF but about what most other schools are still not doing.

Asked what the peer review team’s praise is implicitly saying about the institutions the reviewers themselves run, Otgo says, “My read is that they were both in awe and also kind of surprised at the speed with which we were able to do these things,” she says. “Because oftentimes we are dealing with institutional politics and competition among different business units on campus – so many competing interests – deans are increasingly frustrated.”

For a prospective student trying to understand what this outcome actually means – AACSB accreditation is held by fewer than 6% of business schools worldwide, so what does it mean to not just hold it but be called an exemplar by the people who grant it? – Otgo offers a practical translation. “You’re not just meeting the minimum requirements for education,” she says. “By being called an exemplar, you’re at the frontier. You’re innovating. You’re offering the latest, most rigorous curriculum.” Parents, she says, understand the distinction clearly. Students, perhaps, will come to understand it when it shows up in what their degree allows them to do.

McGowan, whose vantage point spans both alumna and advisory board chair, frames it in terms that speak directly to the families asking the hardest questions. “USF’s Jesuit identity gives the work more depth,” she says. “At its best, it forms leaders who understand markets, people, systems, ethics, and impact. That is something USF can offer in a distinctive way.” The accreditation outcome, she argues, is not just a quality stamp. It is external confirmation that the formation USF has always promised is now being delivered with the rigor and intentionality that modern business education demands.

THE ROAD AHEAD

The accreditation is ratified. The peer review language is on the record. The fundraising is at double its historical pace. The faculty voted unanimously on a curriculum redesign that had been stalled for three years. The people who wouldn’t come along have left.

And yet no one inside USF’s School of Management describes this as finished.

“I by no means think it’s a done thing,” Shukla says of the curriculum redesign. “I by no means think it’s perfect. It will be a constant process. But we cracked that door open. We showed this was possible within us.” She is already looking past the accreditation outcome to what she believes the school’s next chapter has to be – research and industry oriented, bringing real problems into the classroom, evaluating students not on the artifacts they produce but on the quality of their thinking. “So much of the drab work that we used to make them do is automated,” she says. “I have to now judge them on their understanding of the problem.”

Grossman is direct about what the next challenge is. He has watched a 70-year-old colleague retool entirely to meet the research expectations that AACSB introduced in the 2011 revision – someone who hadn’t published in decades sitting in his office asking how to find journals – and he believes a version of that story is about to repeat itself, this time with AI as the forcing function.

“If I was 10 years younger, I think I’d roll up my sleeves and do it,” he says. But the younger faculty who have arrived in recent years – hungry, adaptable, and unburdened by decades of established habit – are, he says, the school’s real asset going forward. “Youth and enthusiasm will take you a long way.”

Dassios sees the next chapter in terms of what becomes physically possible on campus. The three fundraising priorities – the reimagined facility, the Center for Internships and Career Advancement, the Experiential Learning Lab – are all designed to answer the same question McGowan says families are asking when they sit across from an admissions officer: is this worth it? The $22 million raised over four years is the foundation. What gets built on it will determine whether the accreditation outcome translates into the enrollment recovery the school still needs to complete.

McGowan’s concern is less about the infrastructure and more about the institution’s relationship with what she calls formation – the slower, less measurable work of shaping not just what students know but who they become. “This is not just preparing students to succeed,” she says. “It is preparing them to lead with conscience, competence, compassion, and a real sense of responsibility for the common good.” Whether a transformed curriculum, a redesigned core, and a stellar accreditation review add up to that is a question only the students who move through the school over the next decade can fully answer.

THE WORK THAT REMAINS

Dean Otgo, near the end of our conversation, returns to the lemon-and-lemonade formulation she has used throughout the transformation. “We had to figure out how to make it more intentional and strategic, and not just like, okay, we have to cut,” she says. “We had to not just survive, but also innovate.” The budget cuts never stopped – four consecutive years of them, all without a layoff or a non-renewal. The peer review team told the president and provost that the school needs support now, not more cuts. Whether that message lands is a question for the institution, not the School of Management alone.

What the School of Management has demonstrated, over four years of grinding and cutting and arguing and voting and building, is that the question posed in that January 2023 workshop – if USF fails in five years, what would be the reason? – has not been answered permanently. It has been answered for now.

“I think it answers it for this time and this point in time,” Shukla says. “There’s another review coming up in five years. So there’s always that. But it’s important what we do in the next five years.”

Dean Otgo agrees. The peer review team said the school is a model. Whether it stays one is the work that begins now.

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