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A Principled Leader for Interesting Times
By Nancy Moffitt
An appreciation of departing
Dean Patrick T. Harker, who changed the
conversation about business School.
On June 30, Dean Harker stepped down from his post as
Wharton’s 12th Dean to become president of the University of Delaware. After seven years at the helm, he left the School more agile, more global, and fiscally and academically stronger — an institution that defined its own place in the world at a time when business schools and leaders faced tough challenges and questions.
Taking on a Growing Controversy
His counterpart at Harvard Business School, Kim Clark, met several times a year with Harker, a colleague he describes as outgoing, gregarious, and universally upbeat. “It was always a pleasure to be around him,” Clark — who is now the president of Brigham Young University-Idaho — told Wharton Alumni Magazine.
But Clark saw a whole new side to Harker when it came to discussions about the MBA rankings that publications like U.S. News, the Financial Times and BusinessWeek publish each year. “Exasperation and frustration,” he said, describing Harker’s ire with what he saw as a methodologically flawed process that lacked verifiable data and distracted schools from their educational mission.
And so in 2004, Harker and Clark led a revolt against the dozen or so MBA rankings by deciding to withhold contact information used in polling graduates or alumni — a vital ingredient in compiling the rankings.
“We were the early adopters of a trend that we are now starting to see heat up in higher education,” said Harker, referring specifically to a recent dispute between Sarah Lawrence College and U.S. News about its rankings process. “The point is not that the rankings are going to go away.
They are going to stay. The point isn’t either that the media doesn’t have a role to play in providing meaningful information to people to make decisions. That’s clearly important. The issue is trying to boil all that down to a single number that tells somebody ‘This is where you should go.’”
In his final interview with the Wharton Alumni Magazine before assuming his new post as president of the University of Delaware, Harker was characteristically forceful in discussing the rankings — and the fallacy of schools allowing themselves to be defined by them.
“If you want to be number one in U.S. News, you follow the numbers, leadership be damned,” he said. Educational institutions, he believes, should make admissions and administrative decisions based on educational criteria and goals, not influencing data points to game a rankings system.
“It all gets to a deeper issue,” he continued. “There is a whole winner-take-all philosophy that we have in our society that says, ‘If I don’t go to the top place my life is over.’ And that’s just not true. People go to all sorts of schools and flourish. But we tend to say that if you don’t buy the right handbag, if you don’t buy the right school, your life is over. It’s all part of an overall societal trend that I think is dangerous and damaging to our students.”
- Substance Over Image
- Interesting Times, Tough Stands
- A Pennsylvania Man Goes to Delaware
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