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University of Minnesota Business School Names First Female Dean

Posted on: Wednesday, 6 July 2005, 12:01 CDT

Jul. 6--The University of Minnesota's business school has named Alison Davis-Blake, a 46-year-old human resources expert from the University of Texas, as its first female dean.

Davis-Blake will make $450,000 a year and join an elite circle of women heading top business schools. If the University's Board of Regents approve the selection as expected, she becomes the country's top-ranked female business school dean.

U.S. News & World Report ranks the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management No. 23 in business schools nationally. None of the U.S. schools ranked higher currently have female deans, though Laura D'Andrea Tyson, a former economic adviser in the Clinton White House, now heads the London Business School.

Women as deans of business schools remain rare in general, said Chuck Muscoplat, chair of the Carlson School's search committee. "There's a lot of potential explanations for it and I wouldn't touch any of them," said Muscoplat. "I just predict that she will be a star."

Davis-Blake, who holds a Ph.D. in business administration from Stanford University, currently is senior associate dean for academic affairs at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. Her academic background is in strategic human resources management, and much of her research has focused on outsourcing core business activities such as manufacturing and new product development, and how businesses protect intellectual property under those arrangements. She earned a bachelor's degree in economics and a master's degree in organizational behavior, both from Brigham Young University. Before entering academia, she worked as an auditor for Touche Ross and Co. in New York.

The selection of Davis-Blake ends a five-month national search led by a 14-person committee that included three local business executives. She replaces Larry Benveniste, who resigned last December to head the business school at Emory University in Atlanta.

In early June, the search committee had named Davis-Blake one of three finalists, along with John T. Delaney, an associate dean at Michigan State University's business school, and A. Blanton Godfrey, dean of the College of Textiles at North Carolina State University.

If approved, Davis-Blake will start her new job in July 2006. Until then, retired businessman Jim Campbell and associate dean Michael Houston will continue to serve as interim co-deans of the school.

The Carlson School has 4,400 students and an annual operating budget of $64 million. Davis-Blake will be joining as the school launches a $37 million expansion of its undergraduate program. University of Minnesota alumnus Herb Hanson, retired founder of San Francisco-based Hanson Investment Management Co., has already donated $10 million. The school plans to ask the state for the rest.

Davis-Blake said she intends to expand the school's very selective undergraduate business program by 50 percent, and to do a lot of hiring. About one-third of the Carlson School's faculty is approaching retirement, she said, reflecting a national graying of business school faculty. She also plans to grow a feature of the school's MBA program called "Carlson School Enterprises," in which companies hire MBA students as consultants on real-world projects.

"That's really the wave of the future in MBA education, getting MBA's closers to companies," Davis-Blake said.

The new job is something of a homecoming for Davis-Blake, who grew up in the Falcon Heights area and graduated from the old Alexander Ramsey High School. Her father is Carlson School emeritus faculty member Gordon Davis, and she has other relatives in the area.

"This is a kind of an unexpected bonus," said Davis-Blake.

Search committee members describe Davis-Blake as an energetic, strategic thinker who attends to details, builds consensus well and gets things done. Muscoplat said the committee was particularly impressed with her role in a major restructuring of the McCombs School, where she shrunk undergraduate class sizes, increased the participation of tenured facility and improved career and other services to undergraduates.

"She just stuck out as the person to take us to the next level," said Connie Wanberg, vice chair of the school's search committee.

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Source: Saint Paul Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.)

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