It started with a trickle on Mar. 15, when Dean Joseph B. White of Michigan Business School sent an e-mail to faculty saying that he would depart after 10 years as captain. In October, Dean Donald P. Jacobs of Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management announced that he'd had enough after 25 years as dean of the No. 2 B-school in Business Week's rankings. The three deans represent a combined 42 years of management education. Their departures come at a time when the field is morphing into a new model of relevancy, technology, and entrepreneurship. For Hamada, who had taught finance at Chicago since 1966, accepting the deanship in 1993 was a big change.
Deans can only get things done by building consensus, and that's the toughest part.
Being a dean isn't simple. Hamada did that, but it's a nonstop job. To make things harder, Chicago slipped seven spots from 1998 to No. 10 in Business Week's 2000 ranking, released in September. Weak student satisfaction caused the shift south, along with complaints that the school wasn't covering the New Economy adequately. But Hamada says if anything, that slide made him want to stay.