The University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School this week appointed Harvard professor Peter Tufano as its next dean, the Financial Times reports. Tufano, a professor of financial management who specializes in consumer finance, will take the reins in July 2011 when Saïd’s current dean, Colin Mayer, reaches the end of his five-year term.
Tufano, who first came to Harvard as an undergraduate, estimates that he has spent 33 years at the Cambridge, MA, university. But he also has spent considerable time working with European business schools, particularly Oxford and London Business School, over the past 10 to 15 years, he told the FT. “I’ve been knocking around Europe for a bit, and a little bit around Oxford,” he said.
Tufano is not the first Harvard professor to trade Cambridge for Oxford, the FT report notes. Former HBS marketing professor Douglas Holt until recently has been in residence at Oxford, and long-time Harvard operations management professor David Upton moved to Oxford in 2009, the paper reports. There are also several former Harvard doctoral students working in Oxford, Tufano told the FT.
“Oxford and Harvard are more alike than you might imagine,” Tufano said, noting that to be successful both schools must be able to draw from the larger universities of which they are part. Tufano himself has been working to do exactly that over the past few years by helping HBS develop stronger links to the university, the FT reports.
Tufano, who founded his own social enterprise initiative in 2000, told the FT that Saïd’s Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship was a major draw for him. His initiative, Doorways to Dreams (D 2 D Fund), is working to offer financial services to traditionally under-served low- and moderate-income households in the United States.
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