A well-known former Dean of the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester has died.
According to a website for information about graduate business education, Poets & Quants, Andrew Ainslie died in a cave-diving accident in Ginnie Springs Florida earlier this week. He was 62.
Andrew Ainslie was dean of the Simon Business School from 2014 to 2020.
Sevin Yeltekin is the current Dean of the Simon School. She succeeded Ainslie in 2020.
She told WXXI News that Ainslie was passionate about graduate business education, and often worked to spread the message about its importance.
“(Telling people) why an MBA or any type of management degree was actually a very good investment,” said Yeltekin. “But it needed to be rigorous and it needed to deliver some value. He was the one who introduced STEM into the management education. So that was a huge innovation that almost every other business school has copied over the years.”
Yeltekin said that among her memories of the way Ainslie led that business school was how he interacted with students.
“(He) invited them to his house and had dinner with them and cooked for them, actually. So the student experience was very, very important. And that’s a big legacy of his and that has had a huge impact on the way that Simon approaches the students’ overall holistic education,” Yeltekin said.
A statement released by the Simon Business School said that they are “heartbroken by the loss of our colleague, friend and mentor.” It called Ainslie “a brilliant scholar and educator” who “set wildly ambitious goals and accomplished them all in a relatively short time.”
The business school also set up a web page with remembrances of Ainslie’s accomplishments and time at the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester.
