Today, Gautschi, credits his arrival at Fordham to a period of career reflection that in part stemmed from the financial crisis: “I wanted to go someplace where ethics was explicitly written into what we were supposed to be doing.”

Having a long academic resume including stints at Cornell, INSEAD, Yale, the University of Washington, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Insti-tute, as well as formidable industry consulting experience, Fordham’s seasoned hire has unquestionably been charged with taking the graduate business school to new heights — but Gautschi believes that first the univer-sity must itself become engaged in a broader discussion.

“It’s not just that we’re a Jesuit school, so we look for context. All business schools need to address this. But because we are Jesuit, we certainly need to address this, and that’s the societal value of business. We should not be defensive about being a busi-ness school, even though we’re in the

enterprise of a university,” explains Gautschi, who sought to jump-start the discussion with his consortium paper, which argues that rather than just be sources of skills, business schools should aspire to be centers of controversy within the university.

Gautschi is known to have advanced similar thinking at the University of Washington (UW), where he was a professor of market-ing and international business in the 1990s. Mel Oyler, who completed his doctoral studies under Gautschi at UW’s School of Business Administra-tion, says that Fordham’s new dean was consistently an active advocate for change within the university.

“Often when you are in a prag-matic environment, what’s missing is a more sophisticated perspective, and when you’re in a theoretical environ-ment, what’s missing is implemen-tation. David is able to bring these together around interesting problems; it’s about finding and developing a course of action that legitimately

advances the aspirations of the stakeholders,” says Oyler, a faculty member at Cascadia Community College in Bothel, Washington.

According to Oyler, Gautschi had a strong sense of the busi-ness school’s responsibility to the university and had at times become frustrated when the school’s leader-ship appeared disengaged from larger movements afoot across the univer-sity — a sentiment clearly echoed in the consortium’s position paper.

Back on Fordham’s Rose Hill Campus in the Bronx, Gautschi’s first religious studies course, “Entre-preneurial Discipleship,” attracted a group of roughly 10 graduate stu-dents, including a GE executive whose final assignment explored the social justice dimension of policies involv-ing renewable energy and a Nigerian priest who designed an outreach program to help parishes in Nigeria become more effective in dealing with the impact of oil exploration on the local environment.

“David was very much interested in finding the church dimension in business at the very same time that I was interested in finding the business dimension in church, and where we’ve come to is this relationship between the two where we see the potential for reaching people in business and professionals in any kind of work,” explains Robert Brancatelli, a Catho-lic scholar, who met Gautschi last September at a new faculty orienta-tion meeting and soon thereafter began co-teaching a GRE course with Gautschi at the Bronx campus.

Having supplied not only words but actions to help mend Fordham’s internal divides, Gautschi’s glance ap-pears to be turning more outward as he enters his second year:

“We’re in the financial capital. We’re in the media capital. We’re in a place to which people from all over the world beat a path to interact with oth-ers. So we’re obliged to almost in effect be global in terms of our orientation to receive these people and to figure out how we can create value out of having all of these people together.”

DaviD Gautschi, dean of Fordham

University’s Graduate School of Business

Administration (GBA), likes to walk down

university corridors that his predecessors

never knew existed.

Early this year, when his name ap-

peared on a list of faculty members for

Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion

and Religious Education (GRE), an

intraschool typo may have seemed a likely

culprit. However, word soon spread that

Gautschi was in fact “moonlighting” and

co-teaching a religious course uptown at

Fordham’s Bronx campus, a 20-minute

drive (non–rush hour) from GBA’s Man-

hattan campus.

Back in Manhattan, Gautschi’s second

year as Fordham GBA dean has already

begun, yet Fordham’s well-heeled B-school

neighbors — Columbia Business School

and New York University’s Stern School of

Business — seem all but removed from his

line of sight. Instead, Gautschi’s gaze has

routinely turned inward along the inner

seam that connects the graduate business

school to “the university” — two words

the Fordham dean repeats slowly and

frequently.

“The business school should actually

be at the vanguard of pushing change

within the university. But the business

school is beginning from the position

where it is de facto to first define its posi-

tion, as though it’s disengaged, and this

has got to change,” explains Gautschi,

who believes that such disconnects are

common among business schools and

their university parents. Last fall, along

with INSEAD professor Jonathan Story

(a former colleague), Gautschi authored

a prickly position paper titled “The Busi-

ness School: Serving Mammon or the

University.”

The paper argues that the contribu-

tions business schools make to their

parent universities frequently begin and

end with the rent they pay — a stinging

accusation that Gautschi appears unwill-

ing to soften on Fordham’s behalf. In fact,

the paper is the first of a number to bear

the brand of The Fordham Consortium,

a roundtable assembled by Gautschi that

has now grown to 50 participants or

“fellows” representing different parts of

the world and boasting varying academic,

industry, government, and religious back-

grounds.

This past March, the consortium

Gautschi likes to refer to as the “un-

Davos” convened its second meeting in

Turkey — a country where Fordham

and other Jesuit institutions are all but

unknown. The gathering has no doubt

helped to widen Fordham’s lens — a feat

to which Gautschi has contributed both

inwardly as well as outwardly.

Looking Inward to Grow OutwardFirst established in 1969, Fordham’s GBA opened its doors beside Ford-ham’s School of Law on the univer-sity’s Lincoln Center Campus. The location of the new campus allowed Fordham to play a part in the historic redevelopment of Manhattan’s Upper West Side — but its separation from the rest of the university led Fordham to operate GBA mostly as an indepen-dent entity. According to Fordham faculty, the physical separation of the graduate school has over the years en-

couraged a type of psychological sepa-ration, a development that contrib-uted to the graduate business school’s disengagement from the university. Gautschi now views helping GBA get plugged in to the university as being critical to the school’s future health as it belatedly responds to the changing economics of a business education.

According to Gautschi, only 25 percent of GBA students get some form of underwriting from their employers, compared to 100 percent in 1969. “The model that was origi-nally used for the school is way out of date, and we haven’t caught up,” he says, clearly viewing a new economic model taking shape as Fordham mends its internal divides.

“‘We’re the Graduate Business School of the Jesuit University of New York’ — we’ve never said that before, but we’re saying that now,” explains Gautschi, who says that he believes that students will be attracted to Fordham GBA for the same reasons he was — the school’s New York City address and the fact that it is one of 28 Jesuit colleges in the United States.

By Jack Sweeney

8 The CFO AlliAnCe QuArTerly Fall 2011 Fall 2011 The CFO AlliAnCe QuArTerly 9

HIGHER EDUCATION

Fordham’s New B-School Dean Helps the Jesuits Get Down to Business

BeinG One With a university: Gautchi has argued the

contributions business schools make to their parent universi-

ties too often begin and end with the rent they pay.