Madhav Rajan Reappointed As Chicago Booth’s Dean

Chicago Booth Dean Madhav Rajan has been reappointed to a third term

Madhav Rajan has been reappointed to a third term as dean of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, the school announced Tuesday (September 1). The move keeps Rajan atop one of the world’s leading business schools for a ninth year – and counting.

The reappointment lands as Rajan is already holding two titles at once. Since July, he’s been Booth’s inaugural Steven S. Wymer dean. Since June 2025, he has also served as the University of Chicago’s chief global strategist, a university-wide post that puts him in charge of UChicago’s international centers in Beijing, Delhi, Hong Kong, Paris and London – on top of running Booth itself.

Both appointments underscore how unusual Rajan’s run has become, at a moment when most of his counterparts don’t make it past a single term, let alone a third.

A 3RD TERM IS INCREASINGLY RARE

Deanships used to be long-haul jobs. Tenures of 10 to 20 years weren’t unusual through the 1980s and 1990s. That era is over. According to AACSB International, the median tenure of a business school dean fell to 6.2 years in the 2023-24 cycle, down from 6.8 years just three years earlier. Fundraising demands, rankings pressure, and the sheer administrative weight of running a modern B-school have made the job a shorter-term assignment than it once was.

Third-term reappointments, in particular, have become something close to a novelty. When the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business gave Dean Scott Beardsley a third term in December 2024, the school noted he was the only dean in Darden’s history since its 1955 founding to reach one. (Beardsley has since moved on – he was named UVA’s president last December.) The University of Connecticut’s business school reappointed Dean John Elliott to a third term in 2022, another case rare enough to merit its own announcement letter from the provost’s office.

Third terms do turn up elsewhere in academia – Northwestern reappointed Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Dean Adrian Randolph to a third term last year – but among business school deans specifically, Rajan now joins a very short list.

9 YEARS OF EXPANSION

Rajan, an accounting scholar who joined Chicago Booth from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in 2017, began his second term in July 2022. Over his tenure, Booth has expanded its footprint across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, completed fundraising for its Hong Kong campus and opened a new campus in London. The school exceeded its fundraising goal in the University of Chicago’s capital campaign, raising $1.17 billion.

Rajan also guided the creation of the Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence, launched a healthcare-focused research initiative, and – through the Boundless Scholarship Initiative – doubled the amount of MBA scholarship funding available, extending awards to part-time and executive MBA students for the first time.

On the academic side, Booth partnered with the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics to launch a Business Economics major that has become the largest in the College, and it built an accelerated three-year JD/MBA with the Law School. The school also opened Mindworks, described as the first storefront behavioral science lab and discovery center of its kind.

A NEW NAME ON THE DOOR

Rajan’s reappointment follows another milestone for the role itself. In July, Booth announced it had received a major gift from University of Chicago trustee Steven S. Wymer, an MBA graduate of the school, creating the first endowed deanship in the university’s history. Booth’s top job is now formally titled the Steven S. Wymer dean, and Rajan is the first to hold it.

“It is fitting for the deanship to bear Steve’s name, given his remarkable philanthropic leadership,” Rajan says of the naming.

Provost Baicker’s own path adds a layer of institutional continuity to the announcement: She previously served as dean of UChicago’s Harris School of Public Policy before moving into the provost’s office – meaning Rajan’s third term was confirmed by a fellow former UChicago dean.

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