You are Marlene Ostwald, two weeks into the job as Vice President for Academic Affairs at Rheinmain Graduate School of Business in Frankfurt. Two documents that arrived four days apart are, without saying so, about the same eight people. Before you assign a single professor you have to decide what kind of problem the school has: in six weeks you table the plan to the Rector.
The situation
RGSB is a private business school with 2,400 students, 88 core faculty and some 140 adjuncts. It earns EUR 96 million and runs a 9% surplus, about EUR 8.6 million, which pays for research time, scholarships and a digital campus. Executive education brings in 31% of revenue at a contribution margin near 42%, and has grown for four years on the same senior professors.
The first document is an informal memo from the AACSB peer-review team: 2 of the 12 programs sit below the qualified-faculty bar (90% of teaching), executive teaching days are not counted against workload, and that portfolio, a third of revenue, has no evidence of learning at all: only a net-promoter score of 72. The second is a signed EUR 6.2 million contract (about 2.6 million of contribution) for a large industrial group, launching in sixteen weeks and deliverable only by eight named senior professors.
The 22 most research-active professors average 1.34 times the normal load once all executive days are counted; six sit above 1.5. Three will not renew their executive commitments and one holds an outside offer. Recruiting a senior professor takes about eleven months; the EQUIS review comes in eight and AACSB in fourteen. The Dean of Faculty sees a shortage; the Director of Executive Education, an opportunity; the Head of Quality, paperwork; the Director of Finance, two problems at once. And you yourself, as a program director, signed workload sheets that left those days out.