Claremont’s Drucker School Names a Multifaceted Dean

Claremont Graduate University has named a new management dean who combines experience in university administration, state government and banking.

Ira A. Jackson, 58, succeeds Cornelis A. “Kees” de Kluyver, who served as dean of the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management for seven years.

“Ira Jackson is an accomplished entrepreneur of noble causes in universities, business, government and the social sector. His career is living Drucker,” Robert Klitgaard, president of Claremont Graduate University, said in a statement.

The management school is named after former professor and dean Peter Drucker, who is credited with defining the role of management guru. He died last year at age 95.

Classes are taught with a values-oriented point of view that is a legacy of the philosophy Drucker first outlined in “Concept of the Corporation,” the 1946 book that emerged from his two years of studying General Motors Corp.

“The overseer of the unskilled peasants who dragged stone for the pyramids did not concern himself with morale or motivation,” Drucker wrote.

But modern management is different, he said: “Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.”

Jackson said he intended to adhere to Drucker’s teachings.

In an age of frequent corporate scandal, he said, “there’s a palpable need for what we do -- creating new managers and leaders who are both effective and ethical.”

The dean, who started work at Claremont last week, said he planned to enlarge the school, which has 300 full-time students and 14 full-time faculty members.

But Jackson declined to outline just how big the Drucker school might become. He said he needed time to meet with the faculty and better judge the “competitive landscape.”

Southern California is home to several established, widely known business schools, including those at UCLA, USC, UC Irvine and Pepperdine University.

Jackson has a long list of business and management credentials. Most recently, he was chief executive of the Arizona State University Foundation.

He also served as the senior associate dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, his alma mater.

Jackson left Harvard in 1982 to become commissioner of revenue for Massachusetts. He also is a former executive vice president of BankBoston.

De Kluyver will remain at the Drucker school as its Masatoshi Ito professor of management.