Stanford B-School Dean Jonathan Levin on Diversity, Jobs, and Covid

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Levin is an economist best known for his work on contracting relationships and the design of market rules. Education-finance reporter Janet Lorin caught up with him via Zoom to discuss the coronavirus, jobs, and the diversity initiative introduced last year by Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where he’s been dean since 2016. Here’s an edited version of their conversation.

Has your diversity push involved changes to the case studies you use to illustrate the issues business leaders face?
We set a goal that we would try to have all of the cases feature protagonists who in some broadly defined way expand diversity. In particular, we wanted to increase the number of cases with 100% minority protagonists. We got a lot of help from alumni, particularly our Black alumni, who helped us find interesting protagonists. About 19 are completed or in progress. Two years ago, about 1% of our cases featured Black protagonists. Next year it will be 6%.

What will the B-school look like a decade from now if your efforts are successful?
We want everyone who comes to the school to be exposed to a diverse community, a global community, of students and faculty, and to be in a place where there’s all kinds of different experiences and perspectives and a strong sense of belonging. If the school does its job well over 10 years or 20 years or 30 years, what will be different is the pictures of corporate leaders in the U.S. and around the world.

What’s your sense of the job market?
It’s much, much better than last year. There’s a robust pipeline of internships, and so far our students seem to be having good success. But we’re watching it carefully, because it’s such an unusual time, with so many challenges. It’s a little early to tell, but I’m hopeful that the opportunities for graduates will be quite rich this year. There’s been so much disruption during the pandemic that, in a certain way, it’s a great time to be starting out, because there are a lot of possibilities.

What have you and the faculty learned during the pandemic?
It’s been the year of the most innovation in education in decades, maybe ever. Every faculty member has had to rethink the way they teach. Lectures are not that effective on Zoom, so many of our faculty have done things like extensively using breakout rooms. But there are parts of the in-person educational experience that we just can’t replicate: the serendipity of bumping into people on campus and talking after class—the people you meet in unplanned ways and the ideas that come up.

Will you keep anything from the way you’ve run things this year?
You can bring in guest speakers from China for 10 minutes instead of flying them over for a three-day trip to talk to a class. And business school has typically been an intense residential experience for a short period of time. With a virtual environment, you can start giving access before students come and after they leave. You can spread things out. We’ve already seen that in the last year in the types of events we can run for alumni.

Were students from other countries able to attend in person this year?
Last summer we offered all our international students the opportunity to defer the start of the program, because it was unclear whether they could get to campus. The great majority of them decided to come. We’ve continued to see strong applications internationally.
 

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