Over the last four years, one of the comments I've heard most often about Penn has been: "we came here at the right time."
And I'm not just talking about the opening of the Ben and Jerry's on 40th Street.
Rather, many students cannot imagine Penn without its wealth of interdisciplinary programs, centers of study and majors. Add to that prime new real estate such as the Pottruck Center or Huntsman Hall and other innovations that have made life at Penn so great - and which we take for granted.
The key word here is innovation.
And innovation is the reason why it is so hard to say goodbye to Patrick Harker as the Dean of the Wharton School.
On July 1, 2007, Harker will take over as the president of the University of Delaware, where he will be in charge of a $1.2 billion endowment, 21,000 students and nearly 4,000 employees.
Harker's departure will be a great loss for Penn - and a great win for Delaware. The focus that he has placed on innovation as a way to expand Wharton's global reach and to secure its place as a dominant producer of business knowledge in the world helped secure the school's top reputation.
"It is hard to find a part of the Wharton School that hasn't been improved under Patrick's tenure," said Wharton School Deputy Dean David Schmittlein, who has interacted closely with Harker throughout his tenure.
For example, there's the creation of Wharton West - a San Francisco campus that gave greater reach to Wharton's executive education program - and an academic alliance with INSEAD, a leading business school outside the United States. Both innovations certainly helped give Wharton a more global focus.
Similarly, the launch of Wharton's online business journal, Knowledge@Wharton, and its own book press, Wharton School Publishing, gave faculty and researchers a greater forum for sharing their business insights.
And let's not forget Harker's $445 million fund-raising campaign, the largest in Wharton's history, without which many of these initiatives would not even be possible.
All this means that it is going to be difficult finding someone capable of adequately filling Harker's shoes.
"He's a very charismatic leader, a pleasure to sit down with and always full of ideas," said Marc Garfinkle, a Wharton junior and member of the Dean's Undergraduate Advisory Board.
Not surprisingly, then, the most immediate challenge for the next dean will be to maintain Harker's innovative leadership in everything from fundraising to alumni relations.
"He helped energize the Wharton alumni base and one of the challenges of the next dean will be to build on that energy," Shmittlein said.
Equally important will be the challenge of protecting Wharton's faculty from being hired away by other institutions.
"Management education is a very competitive activity. Schools are continually trying to lure away the Wharton School's faculty," Schmittlein said.
Under Harker, Wharton has done an excellent job of keeping its 250-member business faculty - the largest in the world - from being hired away by rival institutions such as the Harvard Business School.
At the same time, though, as Harker said at a 2005 Dean's Forum, hiring from competitors like HBS is difficult because "they have more money than God." Thus, maintaining Wharton's retention of its faculty and increasing its ability to cherry pick the brightest minds from other universities will be another key task for the next dean to tackle.
Furthermore, with an ever-more prominent Wharton in the foreseeable future, there is a good possibility that the divide between Wharton and the rest of the University community may continue to grow.
It is therefore important that the next dean continue Harker's focus on creating interdisciplinary programs, minors and hubs, such as the Weiss Tech House, as a way of better connecting Wharton with the greater university community.
Meeting these challenges is a matter of improving upon Harker's strong legacy.
He is precisely the sort of administrator who made us think, "we came here at the right time." We anticipate watching his successor make the "right time" into "anytime."
Cezary Podkul is a College and Wharton fifth-year senior from Franklin Park, Ill. His e-mail address is podkul@dailypennsylvanian.com. The Salad Strikes Back appears on Tuesdays.
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