Moderator Ann Hsu (Chinese Chapter Board Member) and Dean Harrison chatted about the dean’s personal background, her Berkeley experience as a student, professor and now dean, and a number of current issues facing Haas and Berkeley, including COVID-19, the Black Lives Matter movement, eroding relations with the EU and China, possible passage of ACA 5 which would reinstate affirmative action in admissions (effectively a repeal of Prop 209 which prohibits considering race, sex or ethnicity in admissions), and the Bamboo Ceiling that Asian Americans face in corporate America.

About Dean Ann Harrison:

Ann E. Harrison, the 15th dean of the Berkeley-Haas School of Business, is a renowned economist.  One of the most highly-cited scholars globally on foreign investment and multinational firms, she is the author of dozens of journal articles, the editor of three books, and a winner of the prestigious Sun Yefang Prize by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2017 for co-authoring The Factory-Free Economy: Outsourcing, Servitization, and the Future of Industry. Harrison has deep Berkeley roots; she earned her bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley with a double major in economics and history as well as serving as a professor of Berkeley’s Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics from 2001 to 2011. Harrison returned to UC Berkeley from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School where she was a professor of multinational management and business economics and public policy. Prior to Wharton, she was the director of development policy at the World Bank, where she co-managed a team of 300 researchers and staff.  Harrison has also held positions at Columbia Business School, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and the University of Paris. Harrison earned her PhD in economics from Princeton University. She also holds a DEUG (diplômed’étudesuniversitairesgénérales) from the University of Paris. Born in France, she is a dual citizen of the U.S. and France.