B. Joseph White - Ross School of Business Deanship

Ross School of Business Deanship

White served from 1990 to 2001 as dean of the University of Michigan's Stephen M. Ross School of Business. During his deanship, the School's MBA, BBA, and executive education programs were highly ranked. The School's endowment rose from $30 million to more than $250 million. Endowed Chairs increased from nine to thirty-nine.

White led a major MBA curriculum overhaul, which aimed to intensify the development of students' professional and practical skills. The reforms re-defined the school's image and fueled a rise in its reputation, including being named one of the two "most innovative" business school's in the nation, according to BusinessWeek magazine's surveys of corporate executives. The core innovation, called MAP (Multidisciplinary Action Project), puts students into "live cases" inside companies for seven weeks. White likened it to a medical school residency. In addition, White's curriculum reform included cutting the 14-week semesters in half and adding executive education-style skills development seminars. Other initiatives, such as research on how to supplement the GMAT with a test of "practical intelligence," helped cement the school's reputation for concerning itself as much with the real-world performance of its graduates as their intellectual development.

Among the other highlights of White's curriculum reform was the introduction of an intensive two-day community service and corporate citizenship boot camp as the kickoff of the MBA program—a first among business schools.

Under White, Michigan's African-American enrollment was the highest among the top-ranked business schools. Enrollment of under-represented minorities hovered around 14-15 percent. The School was found to be "the best business school for blacks" by The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. He also moved to aggressively globalize the School. Most notably, he founded the William Davidson Institute to position Michigan as a leader on economies transitioning from communism to free markets.

White was an early mover on distance learning, initially creating partnerships with major companies to deliver management training to their employees. In January, 2000, White's team announced a partnership with FT Knowledge to provide open-enrollment e-learning classes.(FT Knowledge, at the time, was a division of Pearson PLC, owner of the Financial Times and other major media properties.)

White built on a reputation in entrepreneurship grounded in the Michigan's long-running Growth Capital Symposium, which had started in 1981. White's team created additional opportunities for students to get venture capital and entrepreneurship experience by launching a student-run venture capital fund, called the Wolverine Venture Fund. Founded in 1997, its first investments were reported in the New York Times in 1999 and by 2004 at least one of those investments had turned into an IPO. In 1999, real estate mogul and University of Michigan Law School graduate Sam Zell joined with Ann Lurie, the widow of Zell's business partner, to provide $10 million to found the Samuel Zell & Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, and quickly began offering a wide array of courses, heavily oriented toward action learning.

In his second term as dean, White proclaimed that increasing female enrollment in business schools would be a top priority of his administration. This led to a major School initiative, a study of the reasons for low female enrollment at a dozen top business schools, and, ultimately a series of changes at the School. This work also ultimately led to the founding of a major new national advocacy organization, the Forte Foundation.

Under White, several of the School's other major new programs were created. In addition to the William Davidson Institute and the Zell-Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, White also raised funds for and oversaw the creation of The Erb Institute for Sustainable Global Enterprise and The Joel D. Tauber Institute for Global Operations. His administration launched Michigan's first Executive MBA program and built Sam Wyly Hall, a new home for the School's highly ranked executive education programs.

White served as interim president of the University of Michigan in 2002. In January 2005 the Board of Regents recognized him as Dean Emeritus of the Stephen M. Ross School of Business and Professor Emeritus of Business Administration.