Business School gets $5 million for faculty enhancement

Two executives have given $5 million to help recruit and retain top faculty at the School of Business.

The executives are Michael Lehman, vice president and chief financial officer of Sun Microsystems, Palo Alto, Calif., and David Grainger, senior chairman of W.W. Grainger, Inc., Lake Forest, Ill., and The Grainger Foundation.

Lehman’s gift of $4 million and Grainger’s gift of $1 million enable the school to offer an enhanced package of benefits tailored to meet faculty needs in different stages of their careers.

The new plan, called the Life Cycle Model for Faculty Support, provides for the development and support of productive faculty members.

Business schools are facing the challenge of attracting and retaining top faculty, says Business School Dean Andrew J. Policano. “In order to be competitive, we needed to implement an aggressive plan to attract and retain faculty. By funding the new benefit plan, Mike Lehman and David Grainger are helping us achieve our goals in this area.”

The UW–Madison business faculty is known its top researchers and teachers as well as leaders in industry and professional organizations. In recent years, competition for top faculty from wealthy private business schools and private enterprise has made it more difficult for public business schools to compete for and retain talent.

“We recognized we were facing a challenge,” says Policano. “These gifts enable us to be more aggressive in hiring and retaining faculty.”

The new plan–already in action–has made it possible for the school to hire four new faculty members and retain another in the face of competitive offers in the past four months, the dean reports.

David Grainger, for whom the UW–Madison business school’s Grainger Hall is named, is a 1950 UW–Madison engineering graduate. Michael Lehman earned his undergraduate degree in business from UW–Madison in 1974.