Last week, University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann and Provost Vincent Price announced that Geoffrey Garrett has been named dean of the Wharton School effective July 1. Garrett, the current dean of the Australian School of Business at the University of New South Wales and a well-regarded political economist, taught management courses at Wharton from 1995-1997. He succeeds outgoing Wharton dean Thomas Robertson, who has held the position since 2007.
“It will be my honor and privilege to work with such fantastic colleagues, students and alumni at Wharton and all around the University,” Garrett said in a press release issued by the school. “Like other sectors, globalization and technological change are poised to transform business education. I have no doubt Wharton will be in the vanguard of this transformation in America and around the world.”
Garret assumes the top role at Wharton during a turbulent time for the school. In October, Wharton admissions director Ankur Kumar stepped down shortly after the publication of a Wall Street Journal article purporting to show that applications to the school were in free fall, and questioning whether strategic missteps had caused Wharton’s reputation to slip relative to rival MBA programs like those at Harvard Business School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Garrett now faces the task of reversing this perception by strengthening or reinventing the Wharton brand.
Garrett’s hiring has already stirred some controversy. Noting that he has held posts at over ten different academic institutions since earning a degree from Oxford University in 1988, John Byrne of Poets & Quants branded him an “itinerant job hopper” and suggested that more qualified candidates could have been hired from within Wharton itself. However, the University of Pennsylvania has emphasized that Garrett’s academic prolificacy, management experience and history of interdisciplinary leadership make him the right man to lead Wharton into a new era of business education.
