Poets&Quants’ 2026 Dean Of The Year: American Kogod’s David Marchick

When David Marchick took over the Kogod School of Business at American University, he knew enough to know what he didn’t know. “I don’t know anything about AI,” he told a longtime friend, Google policy chief Karan Bhatia, over breakfast not long after he got the job. “I don’t even know what it is.”

Bhatia offered to come give a talk, and to bring a top Google leader with him. Marchick sat and listened as they described a future in which artificial intelligence would reorder the economy as profoundly as fire or electricity. “I just had, like, a holy crap moment,” he says. “This is gonna change everything.” Then a beat: “Little did I know that it actually would change everything – including the way that all of higher ed is evaluated.”

What Marchick did next is why he is Poets&Quants‘ 2026 Dean of the Year, our top individual honor, and, as the selection committee put it, one of the easiest calls we have ever made.

THEY SAID THEY’D FORM A COMMITTEE

Back from that talk, Marchick went to his leadership team and his faculty with a charge: we have to do something about this. The response was the oldest reflex in academia. “They said, ‘I’ll form a committee,'” he recalls. “My eyes kind of rolled, and I tried to prevent an upchuck.”

Instead, he pushed. Kogod won approval for a new AI major and a new graduate program in under six months, a timeline most universities would call impossible. He credits the faculty and staff who were “willing to be flexible and open to disruption,” and says the students benefited most.

Speed became the signature. When the faculty signed off on a wholesale AI overhaul of the curriculum, in 2023, Marchick figured the changes could start that fall. Not so fast, he was told – approvals alone would take a year. “No, it’s not,” he shot back. He cut a deal with Casey Evans, now Kogod’s dean: “If you get the approvals all the way to the provost’s office, I’ll take care of the rest.” Evans ran the gauntlet of some 21 separate sign-offs across the schools and the faculty senate. Marchick got the board, the provost, and the president to move at a pace none of them were used to.

How? “Maybe it’s just being new, or being dumb about academia,” he says, “and just not knowing the limits.”

THE LEAST QUALIFIED PERSON IN THE ROOM

Marchick is the first to say he had no business running a business school. No business degree. No Ph.D. No prior experience leading one. Before Kogod, he spent a career in government, across two presidential administrations, and in the private sector as a senior executive at the Carlyle Group.

“I probably was the least qualified person,” he says. “I had good people around me, I relied on them, and I just brought the energy and the vision. They’re the ones that got stuff done.”

Ask whether being an outsider was secretly the advantage – whether it let him see a path the insiders missed – and he resists the flattering version. “Maybe,” he allows. “Or just being willing to put on a helmet and plow the way.”

The results are hard to argue with. P&Q called Kogod the first AI-first business school. Alumni have opened their wallets, lifting fundraising roughly fivefold. And Kogod’s full-time MBA has climbed to 46th in U.S. News, up from 58th last year and 122nd just three years ago – the fastest sustained rise in the ranking.

PICK A FEW THINGS. HIT THE GAS.

Marchick’s playbook owes more to private equity than to the academy. “Coming out of the PE industry, I said, ‘We have to pick a few things we’re going to be really good at,'” he says. Kogod can’t out-finance Wharton, he reasons, and doesn’t need to. “There’s only one Wharton.” So the school chose three areas to make world-class – AI, sustainability, and entrepreneurship – and, in his words, “hit the gas and invested in them.” The markers followed: Best in Class for AI in Poets&Quants‘ own awards, the No. 3 Best Green MBA in the country from The Princeton Review.

The payoff he prizes most doesn’t sit on a ranking table. This past summer, as Kogod debriefed students back from internships, Marchick kept hearing the same thing. “It was like a Karate Kid moment, where the student became the teacher,” he says. Kogod interns were showing up at companies around the country and training CEOs and senior executives on how to use and integrate AI.

He lights up over a political science major who took his advice two years ago to pair the degree with an AI minor. The student spent the summer at the Los Angeles City Council building AI tools for constituent services, including one that let residents report potholes and abandoned cars. Marchick, who once needed 17 phone calls to get an abandoned car towed from outside his own house, grasps the value immediately. “That’s amazing,” he says.

THE EXISTENTIAL MOMENT

If anything, his urgency has sharpened now that he can see the whole institution. On July 1, American University’s board elevated Marchick from Kogod dean to interim president, handing the business school to Evans. His conviction is that no student should graduate from any university in the country without training in ethical, responsible AI.

“This is a break-the-glass moment for universities,” he says. The collision of shifting supply and demand, federal policy, and AI, he argues, means schools reinvent themselves or risk irrelevance. He points to a Kogod survey showing the share of students asked about their AI skills tripled in two years. His bet: “A first-year student who comes in today – 100% of them will be asked about their AI skills when they graduate in three and a half years.”

He speaks from the dinner table as much as the dean’s office. His own son attended a strong liberal arts college that offered no AI training, then fielded questions about AI in every job interview. “He learned it himself,” Marchick says.

Taking the Kogod playbook university-wide is a different animal, he concedes – “a literature professor approaches AI very differently than a data scientist.” But he is unapologetic about the larger thesis that universities owe students a path to good careers, not just expanded minds. “Many in academia would say, ‘We’re not vocational trainers, we’re not career prep,'” he says. “We are expanding young people’s minds. But we also need to prepare them for successful and fulfilling careers.” The gap between education and careers, he argues, is exactly where public skepticism about the value of a degree takes root.

THE MAILROOM GUY

Ask Marchick what the deans now studying his playbook can’t copy, and he doesn’t name a program or a hire. He names a culture – a faculty and staff willing to try a new path on the understanding that “if we don’t get this right, we can pivot.”

His favorite proof of it came from the most junior corner of the building. The man who ran Kogod’s mailroom sent Marchick a note one day: he had built his own AI program to let faculty and staff book rooms, flag audiovisual needs, order food and drinks, and report a stained carpet or a leaking ceiling. It replaced three software tools that had been costing the school $1,000 a month. Marchick switched to his.

“Who asked you to do this?” he remembers asking. “Nobody.” “From whom did you seek permission?” “Nobody.” “Good.”

Marchick emailed the whole business school to celebrate what the man had pulled off. Told he couldn’t call him “the mailroom guy,” Marchick went to ask the man himself. “Everett, can I call you the mailroom guy?” The reply: “I’m working in the mailroom.”

Of every ranking and record of his tenure, Marchick says, it was that note from Everett that gave him the most satisfaction. A business school remade from the top, it turns out, was being remade from the mailroom too.

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