Selection of UNC’s Brews marks end of long search
USC has picked an associate dean from the University of North Carolina to head its Darla Moore School of Business.
Its choice, Peter Brews, proposed UNC’s international OneMBA program, a two-year program between five schools on four continents, and oversaw it for seven years, until he stepped down in July. He will start at USC on Thursday.
He has also served as a business professor at UNC and as an assistant professor at Duke University and Babson College in Massachusetts. Brews is originally from Johannesburg, South Africa.
Brews’ selection ends a search process that lasted for more than a year. The outgoing dean, Hildy Teegen, announced she would leave in August 2012 to take a sabbatical before returning to teaching, and John McDermott has served as interim dean since May.
USC held two rounds of searches, Provost Michael Amiridis said, because the first group of finalists failed to capture the consensus of the administration, faculty and business community.
Brews was selected largely for his experience with international programs, Amiridis said, and he will be tasked, in part, with developing more programs with universities abroad.
He was also picked for his emphasis on undergraduate teaching — because the business school is relatively undergraduate-heavy — and for his familiarity with the Southeast, Amiridis said.
Amiridis and university President Harris Pastides praised Brews’ vision for the school, but in an interview, Brews said he didn’t want to discuss his goals until he’d had conversations with the Moore School’s faculty.
He did say he would push innovative programs — the sort that are the first of their kind and that are hard to replicate elsewhere. That, he said, is what made UNC’s OneMBA program successful.
“That’s the nature of the game today,” Brews said. “If we want to be competitive in the 21st century coming out of the United States, we’ve got to do things that others have not done before. It’s no good replicating or copying others and doing it slightly cheaper.”
Amiridis said he hopes the business school will be viewed as more of a central player in the South Carolina business community, rather than as an academic supplement.
Pastides said Brews’ experience with the private sector — in academia, he has continued to consult with companies like the Ford Motor Co. and Boeing — was another draw.
“He’s a great fit,” Pastides said. “He’s got academic credibility, but he’s always had one foot in the business world.”
Brews comes to the university as the business school tries to keep up with its counterparts and keep up its reputation.
As part of that push, he will be responsible for developing programs targeted at the corporate world, with curricula measured in weeks and weekends, not years, Amiridis said; those programs could help spread the school’s name and bring in more money.
“It’s not that you can cruise if you are at the top,” Amiridis said. “Everybody wants to replace you.”
Brews began his career as an investment banker but found himself drawn to teaching, a skill he learned showing South African children how to play cricket.
A later invitation to teach a business law course at a school in Johannesburg led to a new career path.
“I think it’s very important that we prepare our students for the world that is coming,” he said, “not for the world that either has been or is.”