The third and final dean candidate for the Martin J. Whitman School of Management dean will be participating in a student forum Thursday afternoon.

Vicki Daniels, the president and CEO of KAC Health, a health care digital company, will be meeting and answering questions from students in Whitman room 402 from 1:15 to 2 p.m. on Thursday. The three candidates for dean candidates are on campus this week for interviews and presentations with faculty and administrators, as the Whitman dean search committee narrows down the position’s finalists.

Daniels has been serving in her executive position at KAC Health since March 2016, taking a leave of absence from her role as an operations and supply chain management professor at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. Her research interests include health care, supply chain management and service operations. Daniels had multiple administrative positions during her time at Indiana University, including faculty chair of emerging graduate programs, founding faculty chair of graduate business programs in medicine and Evening MBA program faculty chair.

Prior to coming to Indiana, Daniels worked at Arizona State University for 24 years, where she took on leadership roles including faculty director, department chair and interim director. She also was a visiting faculty member at Xi’an Jiantong University in China to work on global research, according to her biography.

Additionally, she was editor-in-chief of the academic journal Decision Sciences when the publication saw a “significant” increase in visibility and citation ranking, according to the biography.

The other two dean candidates, Rajiv Dewan, a professor of computers and information systems at the University of Rochester’s Simon Business School, and Eugene “Gene” Anderson, a marketing professor at the University of Miami, have already taken part in student forums this week.

The two candidates addressed students’ concerns regarding the Whitman School’s ranking, the Goodman IMPRESS program and the Charles Koch Foundation grant awarded to the business school, in their respective meetings with students. Dewan said that though students are important, a school’s ranking affects a school’s ability to recruit students and faculty, in response to a question posed by one student on whether Whitman values rankings more than students. Bloomberg Businessweek rankings in 2016 placed Whitman as the 23rd best undergraduate business school in the country.

Anderson said programs are rarely perfect as his response to a student’s comment that the IMPRESS program is “a waste of time.”

The student forums that took place this week are part of the business school’s effort to fill the dean position left vacant by former Dean Kenneth Kavajecz, who last September was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of patronizing a person for prostitution in the third degree. The former dean has pleaded not guilty, and his court appearances have repeatedly been pushed back. His next court appearance is slated to be May 25.

S.P. Raj, chair of the marketing department, has been serving as interim dean for Whitman since mid-October.

Published on April 26, 2017 at 9:04 pm

Contact Satoshi: ssugiyam@syr.edu | @SatoshiJournal