The New Faculty Faces At The Top Business Schools

Harvard Business School across the Charles River

Harvard Business School across the Charles River

HARVARD LEADS NUMBER OF NEW FACULTY HIRES

This year, Harvard Business School hired the most, with 15 new full-time professors (Poets&Quants excluded visiting professors, clinical professors, lecturers, and visiting lecturers). The 15 have a combined total of 16 years experience, post-PhD. The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business hired the second mostā€”13 faculty members with 42 years of previous post-PhD teaching experience. Stanfordā€™s Graduate School of Business hired 12 new tenured or tenure-line professors that will be starting this yearā€”impressive considering the GSBā€™s much smaller sizeā€”totaling 20 years of previous experience.

Interestingly, Columbia Business School has the most experienced incoming new faculty members. Columbiaā€™s seven new hires boast 43 years of previous experience. This is largely a result of the hires of accounting professors Jonathan Glover and Shivaram Rajgopal. Columbia was able to court Glover away from Carnegie Mellonā€™s Tepper School of Business, where he’d spent more than two decades. Rajgopal had spent more than a decade at the University of Washington, where he was tenured, before spending the past five years at Emoryā€™s Goizueta Business School.

Columbia Senior Vice Dean Katherine Phillips says these two hires were the reason why Columbia has more experience this year, while in other years the numbers would skew differently. “Absolutely schools hire from other schools, but it’s not very easy to get senior people to move,” she explains. It’s uncommon, but Phillips says schools will attempt to hire seasoned professors from other top schools and every once in a while are “lucky enough to snatch a senior faculty member.”

‘THESE THINGS DON’T COME OUT OF NOWHERE’

Phillips says that while there isn’t specific targeting or recruiting of senior faculty members from one school to another, “these things don’t come out of nowhere.” The nature of the close-knit community of top B-school professors makes it so everyone pretty much knows each other and their work. “There is always a job opportunity there if it’s wanted,” adds Phillips. “But there often has to be a lot of courting involved for a senior person to move from one institution to another. To move and uproot your family and move to a new institution, there has to be some deep relationships already in place, just like in any other field.”

One of those senior level hires also occurred when the Yale School of Management brought aboard marketing guru Gal Zauberman from Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Zauberman was formerly theĀ Laura and John J. Pomerantz Professor of Marketing at Wharton and has spent nearly a decade there. When the announcement occurred in June, even Yale SOM Gatekeeper, Bruce DelMonico sent out a celebratory tweet.

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