Another business school will be looking for a new dean come June, according to a report yesterday in the Financial Times. University of Chicago Booth School of Business Edward Snyder will step down as dean in June 2010 after nine years in the role.
Snyder’s news comes just 10 days after Harvard Business School’s Dean Jay Light announced that he, too, will step down in June, ending a 40-year tenure on the HBS faculty. Meanwhile, officials at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management are conducting a search of their own to find a successor to Dean Dipak Jain, who stepped down in September.
Chicago Booth’s Snyder will leave before the end of his second five-year term as dean, which would have finished in June 2011. Having decided not to seek a third term, he is opting to leave early rather than serve out the final year as a “lame duck” dean, he told the FT.
Snyder, who is 56, hopes that leaving now will give him the chance to hold another leadership role in education before the end of his career, including potentially a dean’s job at another business school. “My guess is, I’ve got one more big leadership job,” he told the FT. That said, he expects to take a year’s absence from the university next June to “work on my golf fame,” among other things.
Who will fill all of these open deans’ positions is sure to have the business school community buzzing, the FT noted. At HBS, which has always appointed its deans from within, the two current frontrunners are Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria. The dean’s search committee at Kellogg is slated to propose candidates to the president and provost in early 2010, and interim dean, Sunil Chopra, is considered a potential frontrunner, the FT reported.
Meanwhile, University President Robert Zimmer told the FT that Chicago Booth will establish its own dean’s search committee in the next few weeks.
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