Darden School's Robert Bruner Named Dean of the Year

December 21, 2011 — The website Poets & Quants, an outlet dedicated to business schools, announced today that Robert Bruner, dean of the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, is the first to be awarded the honor "Poets & Quants Dean of the Year."

The news was also broadcast by CNNMoney – CNN's business website and the online home of Fortune and Money magazines.

Why Darden's dean?

"Bruner has dramatically rebuilt the base of Darden's applicants so that there are now eight applicants for each available seat. He restored the hiring of top faculty, having brought aboard more than one in four of the school’s 70-member faculty," Poets & Quants founder and editor John Byrne writes. "Not surprisingly, Darden has inched higher in business school rankings, even achieving the highly coveted rank of first place in BusinessWeek's most recent poll measuring student satisfaction."

Byrne also considered Bruner's international outlook and encouragement of all business schools to embrace a "global perspective."

"Bob is arguably the best case teacher who has ever taught at Darden," said Trip Davis, president of the Darden School Foundation and senior associate dean for external relations, in today's article on the Poets & Quants website.

Davis, also a former MBA student of Bruner's, said, "There is a remarkable clarity with which you end a Bruner class, and that's the magic of case study teaching. You go through this 80-minute process of competing ideas and outcomes and this maestro professor brings it together in the last three to 10 minutes. Bob will lean against the sideboard scribbling down the takeaways from the class. The confusion melts away and you walk out with clear lessons."

Poets & Quants covers all that matters in the business school world, with in- depth analysis of rankings and full-time MBA programs.

Media Contact

Beth Schmid

McIntire School of Commerce