Bharat N. Anand, vice provost at Harvard University and a chaired professor at Harvard Business School, has been named the Richard R. West Dean of NYU’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business effective August 2025.
New York University has tapped a prominent Harvard University expert in corporate and digital strategy to lead its business school.
Bharat N. Anand, vice provost at Harvard University and a chaired professor at Harvard Business School, has been named the Richard R. West Dean of NYU’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business effective August 2025. He replaces J.P. Eggers, who is serving as interim Dean following Dean Raghu Sundaram who announced last year that he would step down at the end of his term.
The appointment concludes an international search process in which NYU reportedly told candidates that it would pay a starting salary of nearly $1 million. That would place Anand among the highest-paid business school deans in the U.S.
NYU President Linda G. Mills and Provost Georgina Dopico announced the new dean today (April 3), emphasizing Anand’s experience guiding Harvard through periods of digital transformation.
“NYU is absolutely thrilled with the appointment of Bharat Anand to lead Stern,” President Mills says in the official release. “He is an outstanding choice – deeply strategic, possessed of a global outlook, innovative, highly respected, and exceptionally effective.”
FROM HARVARD TO STERN
Anand joined Harvard Business School in 1998 after a short stint at Yale School of Management. At HBS, he taught in the strategy unit and built a reputation as an expert in corporate and digital strategy, particularly in media industries. He played a pivotal role in reimagining online business education at Harvard, one of the very first HBS profs to enter the virtual classroom. He helped build and launch HBS Online in 2014 which attracted 40,000 students in its first four years. As senior associate dean of HBS Online, helped scale the platform to more than 40 courses and 150,000 learners across 175 countries.
“I grew up in India, where education is really important, and to be able to see this impacting at scale is personally satisfying,” Anand told Poets&Quants in 2019.
He was named the Henry R. Byers Professor of Business Administration in 2006 and the faculty chair in 2013. In 2018, Anand was tapped to be Harvard’s vice provost for advances in learning, where he guided the university’s pandemic response and co-led efforts in residential and digital education. He chairs Harvard’s Generative AI Working Group for Teaching and Learning.
Anand is the author of 2016’s The Content Trap: A Strategist’s Guide to Digital Change, a critically acclaimed book named a Top 10 pick by both Fast Company and Bloomberg. His research has been published in top journals, and he’s twice received the Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence at HBS as well as the Robert Greenhill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Harvard Business School.
Anand received his bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard and his PhD in economics from Princeton University.
In his new role, Anand says he’s eager to build on Stern’s global reputation.
“Stern not only has a superb reputation, it possesses a remarkable spirit – entrepreneurial, determined, energetic, resourceful, and global,” he says in the NYU announcement. “I was so delighted and impressed with everyone I met during the search process, and I’m excited to join this vibrant community and contribute to all that Stern is and aspires to be in the years ahead.”
BIG SHOES TO FILL
Anand succeeds prior Stern Dean Raghu Sundaram who stepped into the role in 2018 after serving as vice dean for MBA programs. Sundaram announced last year that he would not seek another term, but instead become senior vice chancellor and head of global strategy at the university level.
Raghu Sundaram
During his six-year tenure, Sundaram raised $400 million for the school including the three largest scholarship gifts in NYU’s history. He also set new records in incoming class metrics and career outcomes for both MBA and undergraduate programs.
He launched several new initiatives, including the Andre Koo Tech MBA, Endless Frontier Labs, and Stern’s first online programs. He also helped establish new global campuses in Washington, D.C., London, and Shanghai, and laid the groundwork for a joint MBA with NYU Abu Dhabi which welcomed its first cohort in January.
“I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to serve as dean of Stern,” Sundaram told Poets&Quants in February.
“My time as dean has been among the most fulfilling years of my professional life, and I will always be deeply grateful to the Stern and NYU community for the trust they placed in me.” He will remain on Stern’s faculty after a sabbatical year.
Sundaram’s leadership navigated Stern through the pandemic while advancing curricular innovation and faculty growth. His expansion into the Middle East through the Abu Dhabi MBA program positioned the school as one of the first top-ranked U.S. business schools to operate a campus in the region.
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