Business School

The Anderson School of Management's proposal to move toward financial independence from the state is not a giant leap from public to private. For years, the UCLA business school, like many other UC professional schools, has been forced to find increasing sums of private money to maintain its operations. Tuition for California residents already is $41,000, and for nonresidents, $49,000. More than 80% of the school's budget already comes from private sources, and when other factors are accounted for, it's closer to 94%. Numbers are similar at several other UC schools, such as in dentistry, law and business.

There's only one Wharton School. The University of Pennsylvania wants to make sure there's no confusion about that. The university filed a lawsuit accusing a Beverly Hills company of operating an online university that uses the well-respected business school's name and Penn's 132-year-old trademark without authorization. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Philadelphia, seeks a court order that would bar Wharton Business Foundation - and its affiliated Wharton Business Foundation University - from using the Wharton trademark.

When William A. Hasler left KPMG Peat Marwick in New York to take a new job in California, he took a big pay cut. Worse yet, his new salary of $150,000 is exceeded by the monthly losses on his vacant house in Greenwich, Conn., which no one seems to want to buy. Basically, Hasler now works for free. What a dubious business decision--especially for someone whose new job is heading UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. It's not as bad as it looks.

The 107th anniversary of "Little Nemo" by Winsor McCay is celebrated with a Google Doodle today. It was a masterpiece of cartooning from a man who created his art like a man possessed. McCay, born in Canada in 1867, is best known for "Little Nemo," the fantastical and magical Sunday comic strip that began in October 1905. Nemo was created during an eight-year period when, propelled by "inner demons," McCay "was compelled ... to draw and draw and draw . " JVJ Publishing, citing "Winsor McCay -- His Life and Art," by John Canemaker, describes this time in the artist's inventive and often odd career.

USC announced Thursday the abrupt resignation of its business dean, Yash Gupta, who came to the school after a nationwide search 19 months ago. Gupta's departure comes slightly more than two weeks after it was disclosed that he was a finalist for the presidency of the University of Arizona -- a position he didn't win. It also followed a recent sharp drop in a ranking by the Financial Times of the overall MBA program at USC's business school.

Northwestern University's business school placed first for the second consecutive year in a new survey by Business Week magazine. In its Oct. 29 issue, the magazine said Northwestern's J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management in Evanston, Ill., received the highest rating from the 6,000 business school graduates and 322 corporate recruiters surveyed.

Randolph Westerfield, dean of USC's Marshall School of Business, has decided to step down next year to return to teaching, the university said Wednesday. Westerfield, 61, will end in June 2003 what will be a 10-year term as dean, officials said. His plans include working on another in a series of corporate finance textbooks, university officials said.

USC professor James G. Ellis will be the next dean of the USC Marshall School of Business, campus officials said. The appointment, effective immediately, is for a five-year term. Ellis, a USC professor for 10 years and a vice provost for globalization, replaces interim Dean Thomas Gilligan at the business school, which enrolls nearly 5,600 undergraduate and graduate students. Ellis is a former executive with Broadway department stores and the American Porsche Design company. Larry Gordon

Former Blockbuster Entertainment Corp. President Joseph Baczko on Wednesday was named dean of Pace University's Lubin School of Business in New York. Baczko, 59, whose executive experience spans the nursery, video and toy industries, said in a release that he hoped his international business experience would contribute to the development of competitive educational programs at the school. The 40-year-old business school has 5,100 undergraduate, graduate and professional students.

In a move to honor one of its most prominent graduates, Chapman University said Monday it is naming its business and economics school after Orange County developer George L. Argyros. The name change was announced as the business school moved on Monday into Beckman Hall, a $22-million business and technology center on the Orange campus.

A New Yorker magazine profile of Mitt Romney out this week depicts the Republican presidential candidate as an earnest public servant, but one who is too steeped in the world of finance and private investment to communicate effectively with average voters. “He talks to voters businessman to businessman, on the assumption that everybody either runs a business or wants to start one,” writes Nicholas Lemann. “Romney believes that if you drop the name of someone who has built a very successful company - Sam Walton, of Wal-Mart, or Ray Kroc, of McDonald's - it will have the same effect as mentioning a sports hero.

Sophia Amoruso doesn't care if you're offended by the name of her company. "If it's a big shock when you hear it," she says, "you're probably not our customer anyway. " She's earned the right to be dismissive. Amoruso, 28, is the founder and chief executive of Nasty Gal, a fast-rising e-commerce site that has managed to keep a low profile despite a cult following of young women who can't get enough of the company's edgy and provocative clothing. Sales rocketed 10,160% from 2008 to 2011, making Nasty Gal the fastest-growing company in Los Angeles and the fastest-growing retail company period, at least according to the Inc. 5000 list released this month.

Clayton Christensen achieves the difficult feat of being at once imposing and humble. When I visited him last autumn at Harvard Business School, he laid out with quiet authority his latest thoughts on disruptive technology, the concept that justly made him famous in the mid-1990s. But he also took time to chat about his son's college basketball team, a poster of which hangs on one wall of an office full of family photos and memorabilia. Although he places great value on his family and faith — he is a devout Mormon — his research and teaching have dominated his public story.

Let's face it, Mitt Romney seems more than a little opaque. On the one hand he's über-rich, incredibly smart and nakedly ambitious; on the other he seems somehow robotic, shut-down and so happy to embrace the pragmatic option that the core of his character remains elusive. There's a sense of a man who will eagerly deny even his own best achievements if doing so will help him seize the brass ring. Is he inauthentic or merely trying to find that area known as the common ground? "The Real Romney" by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman of the Boston Globe lays out Romney's story in full and clear detail, including fascinating in-depth stuff about his family's history, a tale that, going back in time, involves the bloody foundations of Mormonism, as well as plural marriage and a flight to Mexico to avoid prosecution for bigamy.

Fred Milano Doo-wop singer with Dion and the Belmonts Fred Milano, 72, a singer who made rock 'n' roll history on doo-wop hits with Dion and the Belmonts in the 1950s, died Sunday, three weeks after his lung cancer was diagnosed, said Warren Gradus, who joined the vocal group in 1963. Milano lived in Massapequa, on New York's Long Island, and died in a hospital, Gradus said. Milano and his friends Angelo D'Aleo and Carlo Mastrangelo from the Bronx formed the Belmonts in the mid-1950s, borrowing their name from the borough's Belmont Avenue.

An armed man fatally shot by UC Berkeley police this week was a 32-year-old student at the university, officials said Wednesday. Investigators were looking into reports that the man, identified as Christopher Travis, had demonstrated erratic behavior in the past, including possible suicide attempts. Travis, an undergraduate who transferred to the UC Berkeley business school this fall, died of his wounds at a hospital, officials said. He was shot by a campus police officer in the school's computer lab Tuesday afternoon after Travis pointed a loaded handgun at officers and refused orders to drop the weapon, authorities said.

Pepperdine University has received a $15-million pledge for its School of Business and Management, one of the largest gifts ever to an American business school. The three-year pledge from George L. Graziadio, the head of Imperial Bancorp, and his wife, Reva, will allow the Culver City-based school to add 19 members to its faculty, an increase of nearly 30%. Graziadio has also agreed to lead an endowment drive to raise $10 million more during the next four years.

Stanford University's Graduate School of Business has been given $150 million by an alumnus and his wife to establish an institute dedicated to helping developing economies and reducing poverty around the world. The gift, which the university will announce Friday, is from Robert King, who earned a master's degree in business administration from in 1960 and became a successful Silicon Valley investor, and his wife, Dorothy. University officials described it as the second largest single publicly disclosed gift to Stanford, topped only by a $400-million donation from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in 2001.

Apple Inc. now has to get down to the business of surviving its founder. It's something that Apple - and Steve Jobs himself - had been painstakingly planning for years. Deep inside its sprawling Cupertino, Calif., campus, one of the world's most successful and secretive companies has had a team of experts hard at work on a closely guarded project. PHOTOS: The life of Steve Jobs But it isn't a cool new gadget. It's an executive training program called Apple University that Jobs considered vital to the company's future: Teaching Apple executives to think like him. "Steve was looking to his legacy.