Harvard University has appointed Srikant Datar as the next dean of its business school. Datar will take over from another Indian American, Nitin Nohria. “He is a leading thinker about the future of business education,” Harvard University President Larry Bacow said on Friday while announcing the appointment of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), alumni. Datar joins another Indian American leading an institution at the Ivy League university, Rakesh Khurana, the dean of Harvard College. At Chicago University’s Booth School of Business, one of the top tier institutions, Madhav Rajan is the dean.

Nohria had announced last year that he would step down as the dean after 10 years on the job in June but was asked by the university to continue till the end of this year because of the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Datar is currently the senior associate dean for university affairs at Harvard Business School (HBS). Datar is a chartered accountant who graduated from the Bombay University and after his gold medal graduation from IIM-A and from the Institute of Cost and Works Accountants of India, he received his doctorate from the Stanford University.

He has taught at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon University before joining the HBS in 1996. In India, he was a member of the Tata Administrative Service, the central management pool of the conglomerate, and a visiting professor at the Bajaj and Xavier’s management institutes in Mumbai.

Soumitra Dutta has been the dean at Cornell University’s management school, another Ivy League institution, and Suni Kumar at Chicago University’s Booth.

Dipak Jain, who served as the dean of INSEAD, the leading European business school, is now Europe President at China Europe International Business School.

—Arul Louis