Universities Weblog

(Source: Yale University)

Yale University. Top law school? Check. Great medical school? Check. First-class drama school? Check. Premier business school? Um….

Not yet. The Yale School of Management ranks 15th in the most recent U.S. News survey of business schools. That's not bad, unless you're Yale.

Enter a new dean with Harvard and Stanford B-school credentials. He's revamping the curriculum, raising a bunch of money and reworking Yale's public image. His goal? Nothing less than the top five.

Consider this bit from the Boston Globe:

When the name on the door is Yale, there's no room to be second class in the field of business education.

So the Ivy League university last year hired a dean with Harvard and Stanford credentials to reinvent the Yale School of Management, founded three decades ago with a goal of bridging public and private management. The new dean, 41-year-old Joel M. Podolny , started by tossing out the school's curriculum and fashioning a new one. His goal: to lift Yale into the pantheon of elite business schools that includes Harvard, Stanford, and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

"This school aspires to be in that pantheon," Podolny said in an interview. "It requires an ability to take risks, to teach outside our comfort zone. There is a deep-seated belief in this institution that our mission is so important — to educate leaders for business and society — that we have to set out a model that other schools will want to emulate."

Podolny, who arrived here from Harvard Business School in July 2005, immediately began working with the Yale management school faculty, students, alumni, and recruiters to remedy what most agreed was a disconnect between its MBA curriculum and how management plays out in today's business world. The result was a decision to scrap traditional courses like marketing, finance, and organizational behavior, which aligned with the "siloed" structure of businesses in an earlier era, in favor of an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to integrate the challenges and interests 21st century managers will face.

Read the full article here.

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