HBS Professor To Become U. Mich. Dean

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Carter Professor of Business Administration Robert J. Dolan packed up his office earlier this week after more than 20 years of teaching at the Harvard Business School (HBS), and headed for the midwest, where he will become dean of the University of Michigan’s Business School.

Michigan selected Dolan from an international pool of candidates by a 14 member search committee consisting of administrators, business school faculty members, students and several representatives from outside businesses.

In announcing the appointment May 11, University of Michigan President Lee C. Bollinger described Dolan as someone “known for his…scholarly achievement and dedication to teaching students, his support of academic values, and his nurturing of young faculty.” All-in-all, a perfect match for the top-ranked Michigan business school, Bollinger said.

For Dolan, though, accepting the Michigan job was not an easy decision.

“I’ve been extremely happy [at Harvard], both professionally and personally,” he said.

In the end the excitement and potential for growth as the dean of “such a great business school as the one at Michigan and the opportunity to be a part of a great research university” convinced Dolan to make the move, he said.

Another draw for the new dean was the leadership of Bollinger, who was also a finalist for the Harvard presidency earlier this year.

“My feeling about him was a big factor in my decision to go,” Dolan said. “I found him very straightforward and down to earth and very stimulating.”

One particularly intriguing aspect of Bollinger’s leadership was his emphasis on interdisciplinary initiatives, he said. The combination of efforts across the schools provides a unique perspective, according to Dolan.

“The problems of the world aren’t just business problems,” he said, “and the dean doesn’t just narrowly look at what the business school is doing.”

Dolan said he plans to continue some of his scholarship and research at Michigan, but he will put his teaching career on hold so that he can concentrate on his new responsibilities at Michigan.

“I’ve been told by a lot of deans that it’s more difficult than you might think,” he said.

But Dolan said that he will definitely return to the classroom at some point, even if only for a few weeks.

“For me, teaching and research have always been synergistic things,” he said. “One complements the other.”

According to Joel B. Slemrod, a professor at Michigan’s business school who chaired the search committee that tapped Dolan, the new dean will face several challenges at Michigan, including development of distance learning and other elements resulting from the increasing globalization of the business world.

When he arrives here in Ann Arbor, Mich. this weekend, Dolan will begin an aggressive attempt to get to know the school and its faculty before the academic year begins. By mid-September, he said he plans to meet with the business school’s 126 full-time faculty individually.

“The first thing I’m doing is to really deepen my understanding of the faculty at the school—what they’re aspiring to, and what they as a group think we should be doing,” Dolan said.

Dolan joined the HBS faculty in 1980 after four years of teaching at the University of Chicago’s business school. He is an expert on product policy and pricing, and has written or co-written eight books and also served on the review boards of the Journal of Marketing and Marketing Science.

Last fall, HBS Dean Kim B. Clark ’74 named Dolan the senior associate dean and director of the division of research at HBS, a position which would have been effective this summer.

—Staff writer Catherine E. Shoichet can be reached at shoichet@fas.harvard.edu.