UCI management deans take over as a trio

Deirdre Newman

The rebellion that toppled the former dean of UC Irvine’s Graduate

School of Management has resulted in a new management system for the

school -- one interim dean and two vice-deans.

The triumvirate will be overseeing the school this year on a trial

basis for two reasons, said Jone Pearce, a veteran UCI business

school professor who stepped up to the challenge of interim dean: to

support her in her efforts to ameliorate the problems that

precipitated the departure of David Blake, who resigned last April

amid scathing criticism from some senior faculty; and because the

university is open to hiring a non-academic dean as a permanent

replacement.

The two-tiered management structure would also be necessary if a

non-academic dean was to lead the school, Pearce added.

So Pearce turned to two longtime colleagues as vice deans: Mary

Gilly, who is in charge of academic affairs, and Joanna Ho, who will

oversee the MBA program. While it is unusual to have three women

presiding over a business school, the trio prefers to focus on their

goals for the future rather than their gender.

First and foremost is raising the morale within the business

school and its visibility to the outside world. Many of Blake’s

critics had complained that the marketing resources for the school

were misguided.

“We haven’t done a good job of communicating what our programs

are,” Pearce said.

Pearce, who has been at UCI since 1979, said one of her top

priorities is to help the business school adapt to the changing world

around it. One of her first steps was changing the school’s focus to

downplay information technology.

“Before, IT was something broad in the dot-com days,” Pearce said.

“Now IT is more narrow. A lot of [IT] companies collapsed under their

feet.”

Pearce’s background is in industrial organizational psychology,

which involves applying psychology to organizations. Working at

various jobs throughout college, she said she was constantly appalled

by communication breakdowns in the workplace.

One of the highlights of her academic career was teaching one of

the first MBA classes behind the Iron Curtain, after communism

collapsed in Hungary.

“I said I had to do this because this will only happen once,”

Pearce said. “Communism will only fall once.”

More recently, she has been involved in research examining the

role of social relationships in business.

While Pearce acknowledged Blake’s departure was traumatic for the

faculty, she initially resisted overtures to become interim dean,

partially because of her time commitment as president of the

International Academy of Management. Eventually, her concerns for the

school’s future outweighed any reservations.

“For the first time in my life, I was genuinely worried [about the

school],” Pearce said.

“I didn’t think it was a sinking ship. I thought they were all

fixable problems. It isn’t that I am righting the ship so much,

because this is a strong place.”

Her first challenge when she became interim dean was unpleasant:

cutting a huge chunk of money out of the school’s budget due to the

state’s financial shortfall and a drop in enrollment in the executive

MBA program.

Aiding Pearce is Gilly, a marketing professor who has been at UCI

since 1982.

Some of her recent research includes online shopping and how the

Internet increases the independence and interconnectedness of senior

citizens.

One of her goals is to maintain a standard of excellence in the

hiring process despite the financial cutbacks, Gilly said. Four

faculty positions are open.

“Just because it’s a difficult budget year, it shouldn’t make a

difference,” Gilly said. “But it will be challenging. There are still

some unknowns, but I think we can still do a good job of recruiting.”

While Gilly focuses on hiring, Ho will concentrate on making sure

student expectation is met in course scheduling, staffing and the

quality of the curriculum.

“The challenge is we have very demanding executive MBA students,”

Ho said.

Ho, who came to UCI to get her PhD in accounting in 1986 and has

been a presence on campus ever since, is chock full of ideas to make

improvements based on student and faculty feedback.

By the end of the fall quarter, students will be evaluating

student affairs and the career and leadership centers with a score

card. Student evaluations of faculty will continue and professors

will also give their feedback about student affairs. All the results

will be posted on an internal network so faculty can see the results.

“I want to practice what I preach because I teach managerial

accounting and a lot of companies are doing score cards now,” Ho

said. “The students are excited to see it actually being used.”

Ho was quick to point out her opinion that the emphasis on

feedback and rating does not imply the faculty is deficient, but that

“everyone should have concrete goals to achieve and benchmarks of

where they will go next.”

She also hopes to use her expertise to enhance the integration and

coordination of business school courses, Ho said.

All it takes is a software program that enables professors to

check out classes that have been taught in the past and see what case

studies were used so they don’t replicate them, Ho said.

While all three are clearly aware of the challenges confronting

them, they are confident that their experience working together in

the past will carry them successfully through the year.