Many harddriving, hard-driven businessmen dream of retiring to the academic life. Ernest C. Arbuckle, longtime dean of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, has reversed the procedure by announcing that he will leave Stanford next July and get back to business. Next assignment: the chairmanship of San Francisco's big (assets: $4.57 billion) Wells Fargo Bank.
The dean's new desk will be no honorarium. The 115-year-old bank has risen to eleventh largest in the nation under Executive Committee Chairman Ransom M. Cook, 68, who gave up the chairmanship last fall, and current Chairman H. Stephen Chase, 64. When the two retire—Cook at year's end, Chase next May—Wells Fargo's reins will go to Arbuckle, 55, and Richard P. Cooley, who was appointed president and chief executive officer last November at the lean age of 42.
A businessman-scholar who agreed to go with Wells Fargo only after warning that "I'm not interested in any job that's not active," Arbuckle has more management experience than many men who have spent their whole careers in the executive suite. Himself a Stanford business-school graduate (class of 1936), Arbuckle started off with Standard Oil of California first as a personnel officer, later as an organization analyst—with time out for wartime Navy duty as a PT boat squadron commander (for which he won a silver star) and on General Lucius D. Clay's staff in occupied Germany. He later joined a statewide California dairy company, and in 1950 went to W. R. Grace & Co., where he became an executive vice president before moving to Stanford in 1958.
"Campus Renaissance." Then a small institution with a faculty of 29, and an annual budget of around $500,000, the Stanford business school could hardly claim a topnotch national reputation. Now, while admitting that Harvard Business School "is still No. 1 in prestige," Arbuckle claims that "our students are every bit as good as theirs, and so is our faculty."
Whatever the ranking, Arbuckle has indeed worked a renaissance at the Palo Alto, Calif., campus. He set up a blue-ribbon council of outside advisers (among them: Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John W. Gardner), snared hefty foundation grants, nearly tripled the faculty (to 73), increased enrollment by more than 50% (625). He also broadened the curriculum to include ethics seminars and other subjects, built a vigorous research program from scratch. And what was once a California rich man's school also took on an international scope. Out of a conviction that Stanford "has an obligation to help management education develop in other countries," he set up a Stanford-run business school in Peru in 1964, has brought foreign students to 15% of total enrollment at home.
When he moves to the bank, Arbuckle's Stanford experience will therefore have more than academic relevance. Next to expansion of its 230-branch network at home, Wells Fargo is most eager to open new paths abroad.