RIshi Sunak says that going to California’s Stanford Business School changed his life. Stanford “teaches you to think big,” he told a venture capital podcast last year. Instead of a “more incremental mindset”, studying in the heart of Silicon Valley encouraged him to adopt a “smaller, more dynamic approach to change”, says the former UK chancellor.
While Stanford made its mark on him, it’s not clear that Sunak made much of an impact at Stanford, one of the top-ranked business schools in the world. After receiving a Fulbright scholarship to study in the US, he graduated from a two-year MBA program in 2006.
Stanford is a busy place, and a dozen professors and lecturers have since told the Guardian they have no recollection of teaching the man vying to become the next British prime minister.
These include faculty on some of the school’s signature courses: Irv Gruesbeck, entrepreneurship expert, Andy Racheleff, who teaches courses on creativity; Charles O’Reilly, who runs courses on leadership; And Carol Robin, one of the teachers of interpersonal dynamics, popularly calls what students call “touchy feely.”
In a prestigious business school lecture in London last year, Sunak cited Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Roemer, now 42 and also an “inspiring” Stanford professor at Oxford University, to describe Roemer’s influence. Learning about creativity. “I have no recollection of meeting him,” Romer told the Guardian.
Jeffrey Pfeffer, who teaches the popular course, said on LinkedIn that Sunak was among the students, and that he hopes they will “learn about power to get to a place where they have the power to make a difference in power.” the world”
“He doesn’t have the bandwidth to respond to that question,” Pfeffer, who was asked about any memories of Sunak, said as he was about to leave.
Another professor, James Van Horn, initially did not teach Sunak, but later found a record that he was enrolled in a corporate finance department. “He was a good student and had a good attendance, but I don’t remember much after that,” Van Horn wrote.
Robert Jose, dean of the business school at the time, said he doesn’t remember much of Sunak, but that he was a “very bright and very talented student.” “My impression of all of our students was that they were excellent,” said Joss, who retired in 2009.
With a graduating class of about 400 students at each business school, Joss said, it’s impossible to get to know everyone deeply, and as an administrator, “you remember the students who got in trouble or the students who brought home the big prize.”
Sunak The MBA Class of 2006 is not listed among students who, at graduation, are in the top 10% academically, have given awards for service to the university, or have contributed to the school’s social culture and sense of well-being. Dozens of his classmates did not respond to requests to share memories or declined to comment.
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Joss says he has fonder memories of another MBA student in Sunak’s year: Akshata Murthy, his future wife, who he remembers as “very bright, very talented.” Dean knew her parents because her father and billionaire founder of Infosys, Narayana Murthy, was a member of the Stanford Business School Advisory Council.
At Stanford, it’s common for classmates to meet and marry, a trend that is evident in the alumni magazine, Jose said.
In 2009, four years after Murthy and Sunak married in Bengaluru, they made a “generous” donation to Stanford’s business school to support a fellowship in social innovation. A university spokeswoman declined to comment on the donation.
The couple gave $3 million to Claremont McKenna, a small private liberal arts college outside Los Angeles where Murty majored in economics and French. She has been a member of the Claremont McKenna Board of Trustees since 2011.
Their 2018 donation funded the college’s Murty Sunak Quantitative and Computing Lab. The couple said the gift was inspired in part by Murthy’s father’s favorite motto: “In God we trust.” And everyone has to bring information to the table.
