Another potential dark horse and one that I mentioned a couple of years ago is Sunil Kumar who is currently provost at JHU and was a former dean of Booth for, I believe, five years. He was at Stanford for a good number of years before that running the MBA program. Org behavior guy who’s an electrical engineer. Have no idea how he’d be at fundraising.
Edit: @FStratford I think Kumar succeeded Snyder at Booth.
Ooo Snyder sounds like a great option… UChicago PhD, but also a really successful track record at various business schools. I hope they are considering him.
While Snyder sounds like an excellent choice, a big strike against him is his age. He is 68 already. If you want a President to give you a good solid decade (or more) of service, Snyder may be just a tad too old for that.
Kumar is around early 50’s. Agewise he seems to be a more appropriate choice. He can work a couple of years under Zimmer’s tutelage before taking over the head honcho job.
And Kumar became provost in 2016 so 4-5 years is about right to step into a president’s job somewhere.
Yeah I was also just looking at what Snyder said when he stepped down as Dean of Yale SOM a couple of years ago… he said that at his age it’s becoming challenging to balance everything that goes into being dean. So from that perspective it’s unlikely he’ll be interested in becoming a university president.
Another advantage of Kumar - aside from the multi-disciplinary expertise rooted in STEM/Engineering - is that he understands what academic decisions are necessary for running a top-ranked medical campus.
JB - I think you’ve hit on something. At the very least, he must be on the list.
Very difficult to become a top private research university president with a business school background. In fact, I can’t think on any offhand. Lots of prejudice against that background from faculty particularly liberal arts faculty on both ideological and scholarly grounds. Business backgrounds are common in college and university presidents in smaller mainly private colleges where fundraising and administrative ability outweighs ideological concerns
Kumar has a PhD in electrical engineering.
Diermeier (chancellor of Vandy) has a business school background. Kellogg, to be precise. A lot of substantive research is conducted at top business schools. A few with that background have even won some Nobels.
@JBStillFlying Not saying it is impossible. Kumar would not have been named provost at JHU if he was not considered presidential material. Much easier to be business school guy at Vanderbilt while a top research institution has still has much of a southern prep school mentality. Just saying if you compare the number of Law School deans who become presidents especially at top institutions such as Harvard (Bok), Yale (Schmidt), Columbia (Bollinger), Stanford (Casper who was my professor and Law School Dean), Princeton (Eisgruber) and Chicago (Levi) it is a totally different ball game. FWIW Princeton doesn’t even have a law school
You forgot the current pres. of JHU (Daniels). LLM from Yale University; JD from University of Toronto although he’s probably never been a LS dean (Edit: per his CV, he was Provost at Penn) (Another Edit: JHU doesn’t have a law school either).