David Professor of Business Administration Joseph L. Bower says the future of the Business School is in good hands.

"The fundamental issue is we're doing very well," Bower says. "We're constantly innovating and changing."

In the Real World...

McArthur has been able to keep the Business School a leader by maintaining and forging new links with the rest of the corporate World, Aguilar says.

"He's a very savvy guy about organizational matters as well as business matters," Aguilar says. "He's very good at dealing with people with power."

Fenster, a former partner in the investment firm of Lehman Brothers, says he has always known McArthur as "Someone active in financial circles."

"John has an unbelievable ability to get along with business leadership," Fenster says. "He has a great network with the top CEOs and top management of private companies."

That network is central to the Business School's fundraising success. While the Business School officially has a goal of $220 million for the five-year University-wide $2.1 billion capital compaign McArthur says his school won't even need extra fundraising efforts to achieve that figure.

So he's lending them out to the other graduate schools.

"We're expecting to help some of the other schools with our alumni because there are many of them that are interested in the mission of some of these places," McArthur says.

It's debatable whether such sharing of financial resources is an old or new tactic for the Business School. A development official there, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Crimson in the fall of 1992 that the school would not be helping with the capital campaign.

But the dean claims the Business School is currently in its sixth year of putting its alumni donors in touch with other graduate schools, including the Divinity School, the School of public Health and the Graduate School of Education.

Commitments

But McArthur doesn't limit his frenetic activity to Partners HealthCare or the Business School.

Although it's an unusual priority for a Business School dean, McArthur has repeatedly Said that the declining state of American public education is a personal concern. That may be why the dean has become active in the local community in Allston-Brighton, where he initiated a series of programs to use the school to help local public schools.