World-Class Faculty Join USD School of Business Administration

Most business schools would be happy to add one internationally recognized scholar to their faculty but the University of San Diego managed to land two of the biggest names in one year.

Thomas  Copeland is one of the few people in the world with deep experience and top credentials as  both an academic and a practitioner in financial economics.  And Jaime Alonso Gomez’ leadership helped bring international recognition to the graduate business school at Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico. Copeland was recently named Distinguished Clinical Professor of Financial Economics at USD’s School of Business Administration while Gomez is now a Distinguished Professor of International Business. They join School of Business Administration Dean David Pyke who arrived in 2008 after leading the MBA program at Dartmouth’s Tuck School. 

"Our ability to attract such high-caliber professors is a reflection of the great strides we’ve made in the last few years in improving the depth and breadth of our programs," Pyke says. Copeland, who left UCLA in the ‘80s to help lead the corporate finance practice at McKinsey & Co., is happy to be back in the academic world full time. His name is already well known to business students and grads as the co-author of "Financial Theory and Corporate Policy" used by more than 100 universities.  His Advanced Corporate Finance course was well-received by USD MBA students last  fall and it’s no wonder. MIT financial economist Stephen Ross, who served on Copeland’s dissertation committee, says Copeland "is unique in the range of experience he’s had in the business world along with his complete mastery of modern finance." 

Copeland also is hard at work advancing Modigliani and Miller’s theory of the firm, looking at flexibility and its impact on managerial decisions on both the investment and finance side. "I think I’ve pushed their work to a new level," he says.

With Gomez, USD can tap the skills of someone who helped Tecnologico de Monterrey’s business school gain world-wide recognition in just a few years by internationalizing the curriculum and student body as well as emphasizing ethics and social responsibility.  In a measure of the respect that his colleagues have for him, he serves on the board of directors of both of the two leading accreditation organizations for business schools, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) and the European Quality Improvement System (EQUIS).

His new title as distinguished professor formalizes an arrangement he’s had with USD for more than a decade. USD and Tecnologico de Monterrey offer a dual international MBA degree and have frequent faculty and student exchange programs. Gomez, who has stepped down as dean of Tecnologico de Monterrey but remains a professor there as well, says the two institutions share many of the same values and that the relationship between them allows for "designing many new international and intellectually demanding learning dynamics in a global business environment."

Both he and Copeland say USD’s business school, which has been making rapid progress in a variety of rankings, is on the way up. Bloomberg Businessweek currently ranks USD's undergraduate business program 28th in the nation and its evening MBA program 26th in the nation. USD's MBA program was ranked among the top 25 universities in the world for integrating social, environmental and ethical issues into its curriculum, according to the Aspen Institute’s 2009-2010 edition of "Beyond Grey Pinstripes." 

Copeland sees the school becoming one of the nation’s top 10 to 15 business schools in the next decade. "It’s a challenge but it’s viable. We have everything going for us - the right attitude and the right leadership." Copeland thinks teaching is already one of the school’s strong points but that it needs to make the same strides in research. "As Dean Pyke puts it, excellence in the classroom supports excellence in research and vice versa."

Liz Harman | harman@sandiego.edu | 619-260-4682