Bowdoin College has tapped Clayton S. Rose, a professor at Harvard Business School and a former vice chairman of J.P. Morgan, to become its leader.Webb Chappel
Being a professor at Harvard is not an unusual stop on the path to the presidency of a small liberal-arts college. But some of the other lines on Clayton S. Rose’s résumé make his appointment as the next president of Bowdoin College stand out.
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Bowdoin College has tapped Clayton S. Rose, a professor at Harvard Business School and a former vice chairman of J.P. Morgan, to become its leader.Webb Chappel
Being a professor at Harvard is not an unusual stop on the path to the presidency of a small liberal-arts college. But some of the other lines on Clayton S. Rose’s résumé make his appointment as the next president of Bowdoin College stand out.
He was vice chairman and chief operating officer at the investment bank J.P. Morgan, a job he left in 2001, and had also been the bank’s head of global investment banking and head of global equities.
“I had a wonderful first career at Morgan,” Mr. Rose said on Monday. But since then he has been steeped in higher education. In 2003 he went back to school to earn a master’s degree and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation, completed in 2007, discussed how institutional pressures affect the racial composition of the leadership of large companies.
“Being back as a student was a firsthand reminder of the power of ideas, of the importance of the life of the mind, both for the individual and for society more broadly,” said Mr. Rose, who is 56. “So that experience informs what I’m going to be doing at Bowdoin.”
His combination of leadership and academic experience caught the attention of presidential-search firms at about the same time his own interest in leading a college developed. His experience at J.P. Morgan and his academic research on the recent financial crisis and other business issues could contribute to how he handles his new job, he said, “because all educational institutions are faced with interesting financial challenges these days, in trying to make sure that we have the resources to do the job that the faculty and the staff and the students have in front of them.”
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Mr. Rose, who was the unanimous choice of Bowdoin’s Board of Trustees in a vote on Monday, will succeed Barry Mills, who will step down in June after having served 14 years at the helm of the Maine college.
“For me, this was all about Bowdoin,” Mr. Rose said. The college’s liberal-arts experience “is grounded in a very distinctive set of values which are defined by what we at Bowdoin call the common good,” he said.
Along with being a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, which he joined in 2007, Mr. Rose is on the boards of directors of Bank of America and XL Group PLC, a global insurance company. (He said he couldn’t comment on whether he would keep those positions after becoming president at Bowdoin.) He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which supports academic biomedical research.
Two other colleges have recently selected presidents with ties to the world of finance. John I. Williams, who was chosen to lead Muhlenberg College, in Pennsylvania, starting this July, had held several senior executive positions at American Express, was chief executive of Biztravel.com, and had also served as a strategic consultant to higher education. And Mount St. Mary’s University, in Maryland, has named Simon Newman, an executive at private-equity firms in Los Angeles, to become its president this summer.
As senior editor, Ruth Hammond was responsible for the weekly Chronicle List, which compared higher-education institutions on various measures; the annual Almanac issue of data on higher education; the Chronicle Focus series of collections of articles from The Chronicle’s archives; and the monthly Bookshelf page.
