As the five-year tenure of Joseph Thomas, the Samuel Curtis Johnson School of Management’s 10th dean, comes to an end, Johnson faculty praised the outgoing dean for advancing the school’s reputation to a national level.

The University announced Monday that Soumitra Dutta, an expert in international business and computer science, will serve as the eleventh dean of the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management.

Dean of the Johnson School Joseph Thomas recently traveled to Bogota, Colombia, and Monterrey, Mexico, as part of a Johnson School initiative, first announced in December 2010, to expand the Cornell - Queen’s Executive MBA Program to Latin America.

A Cornell MBA student tells the Sun about his deployments in Iraq.  

Scot Safon, who was recently promoted to executive vice president for CNN overseeing the HLN network, spoke to students at Cornell on Thursday about his life, the new age of media and why CNN's rankings have been slipping.

Either things have been especially HEROIC for Cornellians recently, or our reporters are having trouble tracking down the VILLAINOUS stories. But never fear, cynics and sadists, while the headlines now may provide a dearth of VILLAINS to complain about, in no time at all these tales of HEROES and their fruitful adventures will undoubtedly fall back into the realm of controversy and outrage.

Like many students in accelerated M.B.A. programs, Katy Moyer JGSM and Dr. Patrick Collopy JGSM are extensively studying the fundamentals of business administration while worrying about finding jobs in the troubled economy. However, thanks to the Johnson School’s Management Practicum course, they will be able to add something unique to their resumes: real work experience.

Associate Dean for Corporate Relations Randy Allen developed the Management Practicum with students in order to fill a void in the accelerated M.B.A. program. Because of its intensive academic nature, students in the program are not able to complete an internship during the summer as traditional M.B.A. students do.

The reason that the American financial system collapsed is far more fundamental than a lack of regulation, the pervasiveness of greed and irrational exuberance, or even the rewards implicit in the structure of our financial interactions. The contemporary model of business education (and more broadly, social values) should be blamed.

That’s right — as much as I’d like not to admit it — the MBA education is (extrapolating from our observation of the current financial crisis) far from sufficient in a globally interdependent 21st century economy that has never before been quite so complex. If it were, our nation’s business leaders would have seen this coming — and they would have stopped it.

BR MicroCapital, a microfinance business started at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, announced on Jan. 20 that it would offer lending and business support services to help microbusiness development in Tompkins County.

In a press release, Mike Pezone, grad, director of operations for BRM, explained that BRM’s work is fulfilling a local need by providing specialized, targeted support for microbusinesses, which are small businesses typically operated from the owner’s home.

The stated goal of BRM is to encourage development and inclusive wealth creation while at the same time assisting efforts to further local economic development.

In the midst of the country’s economic recession, the Johnson Graduate School of Management’s Cayuga Fund, a hedge fund run by faculty and students, reported a 0.42 percent gain for the 2008 business year.

Although the fund’s investments decreased by 1.29 percent in the fourth quarter, this $12 million hedge fund, finished the year ahead, especially relative to the performance of its benchmarks. Indexes like Hedge Fund Research Equity Hedge Index and the Hedge Fund Research Equity Market Neutral Index reported 25.45 percent and 1.16 percent losses, respectively, in 2008.Cayuga MBA Fund Returns