UCLA Picks Banker Willison as Dean of Anderson School

UCLA will announce today that it has selected former H.F. Ahmanson & Co. President Bruce G. Willison as the new dean of its business school, making him the latest prize in an effort by colleges to recruit leaders from the boardroom instead of the classroom.

Willison, 50, is the first outside executive to fill the post at UCLA’s top 10-ranked Anderson School, officials said, and will take the reins at a time when business schools nationwide are scrambling to offer classes and services that are more in line with the demands of corporate employers.

In tapping Willison for the job, UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale said “his analytical and management skills . . . combined with his extensive involvement in community activities, will enable him to provide inspired and effective leadership.”

UCLA officials also want to make Willison a powerful weapon in the university’s $1.2-billion fund-raising drive, using his entree into numerous corporate circles and experience in charity work to their advantage.

Dozens of executives, from Ford Motor Co.’s Louis E. Lataif to top AT&T; strategist Douglas Dunn, have been asked to play similar roles at well-regarded--but endlessly cash-hungry--academic institutions across the country.

Nowhere is the race for donations more intense than at UCLA’s business school, which is lagging UCLA overall in the fund-raising campaign and has watched its state funding drop 25% in the last two decades as the competition to remain among the top public institutions in the nation grew more intense. In the latest list of controversial but closely watched rankings by U.S. News & World Report, Anderson School slipped two spots to No. 10.

At the same time, business schools are trying to follow the rapidly shifting sands of professional life, in which working managers are increasingly demanding “executive education” programs customized to their firms and mid-career MBA classes. Many business professors believe they, perhaps more than those in any other discipline, must be able to offer classes by satellite and Internet in order to attract top students who already are employed across the country.

“The bottom line is, business schools have to run themselves like businesses,” said William Laidlaw, executive vice president at St. Louis-based American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business, an accrediting agency. “There’s no dean in the country who doesn’t realize that Wharton [the University of Pennsylvania’s business school] is going to be in your market. They’ll be right in Westwood. If they [UCLA] don’t offer good courses, they’re going to lose market share.”

A 1996 study of the agency’s members also found that business schools focused too much on research regarded as irrelevant to most corporations, and that the schools were losing their star professors to private-sector consulting jobs and investment banking work.

Willison has a master’s degree in business administration from USC, UCLA’s cross-town rival. He holds no doctoral degree. He is a former Navy officer who spent 25 years in the banking industry before leaving Ahmanson in October when it merged with Seattle-based Washington Mutual. Willison said he took the UCLA job because “I was looking for a new professional challenge and particularly wanted to focus on the public service arena.”

Willison, who was praised by analysts as a “peacemaker” who has tried to eliminate the glass ceiling for women during his career, started in 1973 at Bank of America, then joined First Interstate Bancorp. six years later as a strategic planner. He eventually rose to become chief executive of First Interstate’s California subsidiary, before leaving amid the parent company’s merger with Wells Fargo & Co. Willison received a reported $2.8 million in severance benefits before moving to Ahmanson, the parent of Home Savings of America, where his 1997 salary and bonus package was $1.5 million, proxy documents show.

He will earn $204,000 as Anderson’s dean, a spokeswoman said.

Other business schools that have looked to corporate America for their deans in recent years note that the academic environment sometimes forces outsiders to adjust. For example, Boston University’s Lataif, who was used to being able to hire and fire without limits as head of Ford’s European operations, has been seeking more flexibility from personnel at the school.

Rather than continuing to hire tenured professors, who are assured jobs for life, he began offering 10% pay increases to faculty members who agreed to come aboard without a promise of tenure.

Boston University officials said Lataif was instrumental in assembling the $100 million in funding for a new building in just four years.

Already a member of Anderson’s board of visitors, Willison said he was pleased with Anderson’s performance.

“This is not a turnaround situation where a person needs to come in and fix something,” he said.