California Dreamer
Fresh from a 20-year appointment at the University of Southern California, Dean Thomas Gilligan dives into Texas during a semester marked by unprecedented economic events. His mission: learn fast, listen well and DREAM BIG.
Story by Cory Leahy ~ Photography by Kenny Braun
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Tom Gilligan must be taking his vitamins. His first semester as dean of the McCombs School of Business has seen more than the usual array of new-school-year activity. From the Wall Street meltdown of mid-September to the Presidential election to the university’s launch of a $3 billion capital campaign, fall 2008 has, by all accounts, been a whirlwind.
In addition to these “macro” events, Gilligan’s own schedule has been chock full of appointments with McCombs faculty and staff, university leaders, alumni, donors, corporate partners and other school stakeholders. While he has been getting up to speed on all things Texas, his family has remained in Los Angeles so that his eldest daughter could finish her senior year of high school there.
But throughout it all, the dean has remained unflappable. For Gilligan, focus, energy and drive have never been lacking.
“Tom is a person of enormous energy and commitment and discipline,” says Brian Roberts, vice president for information technology at the university. Roberts and Gilligan studied for their Ph.D.s together at Washington University in the early 1980s. Those traits, combined with his experience as vice-dean for undergraduate programs and then interim dean of USC’s Marshall School of Business—a school of similar size and makeup—helped lay the foundation for Gilligan to take the reins at McCombs during a time of historic changes in the business world and the world at large.
EXPLORING ECONOMICS
The son of a career naval officer, Thomas Gilligan was born in a navy hospital in San Diego and spent his childhood years moving from base to base along the West Coast and Hawaii. As a teenager, Gilligan and his family returned to his parents’ native Oklahoma, where he completed high school and joined the U.S. Air Force.
In 1972, as the Vietnam War was winding down and the Cold War was as hot as ever, he spent 10 months at the Defense Language Institute learning to speak and read Russian. During the next four years he flew reconnaissance missions over the Soviet Union, intercepting communications.
“That job was helpful because it got me focused on objectives and mission and how you put people together to achieve goals,” says Gilligan, who is also an instrument-rated pilot.
When his service ended, he enrolled at the University of Oklahoma—yes, he’s a Sooner—with an eye toward becoming a journalist. But that plan was short-lived. “As part of a distribution requirement, I took an economics course and really liked it. Then I took another one and before I knew it, I was no longer a professional writing major,” he says. Gilligan graduated in three years and earned a fellowship to attend graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis.
During his five years working toward a doctorate in economics, Gilligan encountered a “perfect storm” of cross-disciplinary intellectual pursuits at Wash. U. According to Roberts, young professors and graduate students from the law school, business school, and economics and political science departments found common interests that broadened their realm of inquiry—an unusual phenomenon for Ph.D. students who more often narrow their field of vision as they specialize and publish.
“Tom brings to the table a vastly broader perspective on social science in a larger sense, a broader sense of interconnectedness among disciplines and issues than you might associate with a more focused disciplinary degree,” Roberts says.
He also took a year and traveled to Washington D.C. to serve with Murray Weidenbaum (then a Washington University faculty member) on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors. “I was there in October of 1982 when unemployment had just hit double digits and there was about to be a midterm election,” Gilligan says. “It was an interesting time.”
As he returned to St. Louis to complete his doctorate, a wide world of options beckoned. He was a veteran and Russian linguist in the height of the Cold War; he had served in the White House; and he’d had a taste of academia, the path he ultimately took.
“I was really just following a passion,” Gilligan says. “I enjoyed doing economic and policy research—talking about it, arguing about it. It was about the ideas.”
Roberts says Gilligan was a leader among his peers because he exhibited a strong ability to consider a plethora of options, then drill down and make a decision. “To see Tom work through an environment that had 1,000 different paths to choose from and to see him stay disciplined in that kind of openended environment was of tremendous value,” he says.
Gilligan’s first destination was CalTech as an assistant professor of economics. From there, he spent time at Stanford and Northwestern, eventually landing at the University of Southern California, where he spent 20 years in the Department of Finance and Business Economics, in addition to postings as department chair, vice-dean for undergraduate and doctoral education and, most recently, interim dean of the Marshall School.
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