Wharton School names Black woman dean

(BlackmansStreet.Today) — Erika H. James, dean of the Goizueta Business School at Emory University, has been named dean of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Her term begins July 1.

James will succeed Geoff Garrett, who is to become dean of the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business. She is the first African American, and the first woman to be named Wharton’s dean.

Since beginning of her tenure as dean of the Goizueta Business School in 2014, James introduced and led an effort to build a school emphasizing innovation and entrepreneurship that is open to all students.

DR. JAMES

James also grew Goizueta’s faculty by 25 percent by the end of her first term, building a critical mass of junior faculty and seasoned scholars in key academic areas such as behavioral and decision-based research, business analytics, and health care innovation.

Prior to be named Goizueta’s dean, James was senior associate dean of executive education at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business and worked to reimagine executive education and lifelong learning opportunities.
James holds a doctorate and a master’s degree in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan. She received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Pomona College of the Claremont Colleges in California.

Wharton, founded in 1881, is the world’s first collegiate business school. It has a faculty of 235 professors and 5,000 undergraduate, MBA, and doctoral students.

It has more than 99,000 alumni, including President Donald Trump, who graduated from Wharton in 1968 with a Bachelor of Science degree in economics.

This article originally published in the March 16, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.