Professor of Business Administration Francis J. Aguilar, another classmate of McArthur's at the Business School, says the dean has been known to write letters in response to certain proposals stating firmly that "this and this and this won't take place under such circumstances."

"He's not afraid of confrontations," Aguilar says. "He has a lot of experience and power. There is no question who's the boss."

Ironically, McArthur derives that power from his quiet unassuming nature and down-to-earth way of dealing with people, colleagues say.

"John's great skill is understanding how to get people to understand the agenda," says Baker Professor of Business Administration Jay O. Light. "People trust him and understand that he sees the problem through their eyes."

"He's incredibly personable," says Robison professor of Business Administration James I. Cash Jr., who chairs the school's MBA program. "He doesn't have a pretenious bone in his body."

Willingness to Change

McArthur has been a dean for 14 years, but he is hardly set in his ways.

"John has a vision of how things will change," Fenster says. "He has a way of seeing the future and getting an organization that moves in a sensible way."

That made it somewhat natural for him to move quickly last fall to reform the Business School's curriculum. Business leaders and the national media, including a cover piece in Business Week last summer, had claimed that the school, with its emphasis on old standards and the case method, was falling behind the competition.

So McArthur launched Leadership and Learning, one of the largest and most comprehensive MBA program restructing efforts ever implemented by the Business School.

In making a rare public pitch for the reform, McArthur traveled to Yale and released comments from a June 1992 report suggesting that the Business School was facing the possibility of financial crisis and "floundering mediocrity."

That trip came the day before the release of President Neil L. Rudenstine's 83-page report on the results of the academic planing process. The president had labored over the manuscript him self, and some--including Boston Globe columnist David L. Warsh '66--Suggested that McArthur had intentionally timed his speech to overshadow the president.

The next day, media attention focused on the Business School's closed door faculty meeting to review a draft of Leadership and Learning, rather than on the Rudenstine report.

But McArthur has dismissed Warsh's suggestions, and Rudenstine himself has high praise for the reform efforts taking place across the river.

"He is moving the school to a position so that it can be more agile in a new economy environment and a new technological environment," Rudenstine says. "His human commitment is unusually strong."