Alison Davis-Blake

Business school deans tend to stay for two five-year terms if the faculty will have them. Alison Davis-Blake served one term at Minnesota, one at Michigan and less than two years at Bentley. The pattern is the interesting thing about the record, more than any single job, because the jobs themselves went well by the numbers. Her authority was academic: a PhD in organizational behavior from Stanford in 1986 and sixteen years on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, where she was hired as an associate professor in 1990, chaired the management department, became senior associate dean for academic affairs in 2003 and stayed until 2006. She has also held editing posts at the Academy of Management Review and Administrative Science Quarterly, the two journals that matter most in her field.

The Utah link is by way of Brigham Young University rather than birth. Born in Palo Alto on November 5, 1958, and raised in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area, where her father taught information systems at the University of Minnesota, she took a BS in economics at BYU in 1979, summa cum laude, worked at the accounting firm Touche Ross, and came back to BYU's Marriott School for a master's in organizational behavior in 1982. The Marriott School claimed her when Michigan announced the appointment; its 2011 alumni piece noted a teaching stint at Carnegie Mellon and quoted Gary Cornia of the school saying "Alison represents everything good about academics." She is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; Wikipedia says so in one sentence and the fetched university sources say nothing about it, which is about what you would expect from a dean's press coverage.

The Ross appointment, announced in February 2011, made her the highest-ranking woman dean at any US business school at the time, per Wikipedia. Scott DeRue succeeded her on July 1, 2016.

Minnesota was a budget job before it was anything else. State funding for the Carlson School fell from 20 percent of its budget to 6 percent during her tenure, and the school balanced its budget every year anyway, according to Bentley's 2018 announcement; she also pushed through the first redesign of the undergraduate curriculum in twenty years. Michigan was a bigger version of the same problem. Poets&Quants reported in 2018 that Ross carried a $40 million deficit when she arrived and $13 million in reserves when she left; executive education revenue, which had fallen to about $11 million, rose 70 percent and was returning roughly $3 million a year to the school by 2015. The university's capital campaign brought the school more than $300 million under her, annual giving rose 37 percent, applications rose 32 percent, the number of undergraduates studying abroad quadrupled, and the MBA program opened a track in Los Angeles. Bentley's release also credited her with raising the share of women and underrepresented minorities at Ross, without numbers. The two sources disagree in one place worth noting: the release says applications rose 32 percent, while Poets&Quants in 2015 recorded full-time MBA applications falling from 2,647 to 2,443 between 2012 and 2014, then a record intake in fall 2015; the first figure covers every program and the second one program, so both can hold. The full-time MBA class shrank on purpose, from 502 in 2012 to 447 in 2014, while the acceptance rate dropped from 40.6 percent to 35.9 percent; the latest class Poets&Quants cited had a median GMAT of 720 and a 25 percent admit rate, and the school moved from 13th to 11th in that publication's ranking. On May 18, 2015, she announced she would leave at the end of her term to work on, in her phrase, "the broader problems and opportunities facing universities." The same article carried an alumnus complaining she was "never very engaged with the students", the one sour note in a fetched record otherwise made of percentages. Her own description of what she likes doing, from the same piece, fits the deficit numbers better than the complaint does: "I particularly enjoy working with faculty, staff, and students to stabilize challenging situations."

Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, about 4,200 undergraduates and 1,000 graduate students, announced her as its eighth president on February 6, 2018, the second woman in the job after Gloria Cordes Larson. She started July 1, 2018. Her pitch at the announcement: "A Bentley education is exactly what the country is asking of higher education today." The end came fast.

• June 2020: she stepped down, citing personal reasons, after less than two years in the post.
• June 15, 2020: board chairman Paul Condrin's message to the community credited her with a strategic plan the university would carry forward and said an interim president would be named while a search for the ninth president began.

The fetched sources give no more than that, and this site does not guess. The board's letter ran to a few paragraphs and named no successor; the search for a ninth president was the whole of the plan. Set beside the Ross departure, announced fourteen months before it took effect and with a stated purpose, the Bentley exit is the outlier in a career otherwise run on schedule. The open question is the one raised in the first paragraph. Three institutions, three exits after one term or less; the record shows an administrator who fixes balance sheets and then leaves, and it does not say why.

Ross: a $40 million deficit turned into $13 million of reserves in one term.