Dartmouth’s New B-School Dean: It’s Time to Disrupt the MBA

Related Articles

• The Buck Stops (and Starts) at Business School 0 15.Jun
• MBA Students’ Predictions For Business Education In 2016 0 13.Jan
• When Will Asia Reach Number 1 In MBA Rankings? 0 05.Feb

For the first time in 20 years, the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth has a new dean.

Matthew Slaughter, Tuck’s associate dean for faculty, will take on the elite school’s top job on July 1. After a tenure spanning two decades, Dean Paul Danos will be stepping down at the end of this academic year, a move announced last March.

Slaughter, 45, wants to shake up the traditional M.B.A. model, because students want flexible alternatives to two-year, full-time programs, he said in an interview. Among his aims: building a digital platform for Tuck courses akin to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School offerings on Coursera or Harvard Business School’s HBX digital platform, which offers online access to course materials.

“We imagine a future where we might have a broader way that students access the Tuck M.B.A. degree,” he said.

Slaughter also plans to expand Tuck’s non-M.B.A. offerings—which currently comprise an executive master of business administration program, a non-degree “bridge” program for incoming M.B.A. students, a Master of Health Care Delivery Science offered jointly with the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, and select undergraduate courses at Dartmouth and Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine—and may add shorter masters programs geared toward younger graduate students.

Slaughter said it is also high time to attract more women to the Hanover, N.H., campus; women make up just under a third of Tuck’s current enrollment. He pointed to a new partnership program with the all-women’s Smith College in Northampton, Mass., set to debut this spring, which is aimed at preparing graduating students there for entrance into M.B.A. programs, as a step in the right direction. And he said plans to have more conversations with Tuck alumnae and participants of the student-run Tuck Initiative for Women about leveraging the Tuck alumni network to advance their careers.