Effective next June, John Douglass will end his term as Dean at the University of Richmond School of Law. Dean Richmond will have been in the post for four years, including one year as interim dean. Notwithstanding this news, it does appear that the tenure of law deans has increased in the last few years. Still, the rate of turnover is still remarkable to me. Although a dean shift can present an excellent opportunity for a school to take a breath and reconsider its path, it's also a potentially tumultuous event. I'm curious whether this would be considered a very high turnover rate for a CEO of a corporation with law-school-sized revenues. (My highly uneducated guess is yes.)
John Douglass Stepping Down As Richmond Dean
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There was an article in the WSJ just a bit ago about CEO tenure. The average Fortune 500 is 6.6 years, although the point of the article was that long-serving CEOs seemed to correlate to the best share price performance (I think).
See: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703900004575325172681419254.html?mod=rss_whats_news_us_business
Dan's point, though, is equivalently sized businesses. I can't find a law school operating budget quickly but my intuition is that entire major universities would have operating revenues on the scale of Fortune 500 companies (e.g., the University of Michigan had FY 2009 operating revenues of $4.3 billion which would put it around 475 on the list if it were a corporation). My guess is that law schools, depending on size, operating annually in the low double digit millions, which would be the equivalent of small family owned businesses, and that data is hard to come by.