Michel Baroni : ‘The Dean must highlight ESSEC’s faculty body’

He is the new Dean of Faculty at ESSEC Business School. Michel Baroni, 63 years old, was elected by ESSEC’s permanent faculty body. A professor of Finance, he wishes to ‘highlight and support the faculty body for it to be at the heart of ESSEC’s strategy.’

‘ESSEC is a very exciting school to work at and where you can do what you want. You only have to convince and you’ll be given the possibility to do it.’ Michel Baroni knows the School inside-out. A Professor in the Finance Department, and defined by some as a ‘pillar’ of ESSEC, he has recently been designated a Dean of the institution. An important function, from now on Michel Baroni must create the link between the School’s faculty body, composed of 164 professors, and the general management. ‘The Dean of Faculty must highlight the faculty body, support it, and ensure that it benefits from good conditions to carry out excellent academic work,’ explains Michel Baroni. The organisation has to be improved for professors to fit into their academic role: they are expected to achieve results above all else in research and pedagogy.’

Research and pedagogy – Michel Baroni has already worked in these fields for some years at ESSEC. Although joining the permanent faculty body in 1999, he had already been delivering teaching within the school since 1981. ‘I was an external lecturer until 1994,’ he remembers. ‘I gave classes in financial policy, then I became head of the Advanced Master’s in Financial Techniques (MSTF). I got caught up in academia.’ The love of pedagogy and research came to him little by little.

A research professor coming from the professional world

Michel Baroni did not begin his professional career in the classroom but in the working world: ‘After obtaining my degree at HEC in 1976, I started my career in real estate promotion and investment.’ It therefore came as natural that several years later in 2002 he defended a thesis on real estate risk. ‘I think it’s an asset to know two worlds – the academic and professional. I’ve carried out research projects for 25 years, but I’ve also maintained links with large organisations in the private sector.’ These links notably enabled him to be in the front line during the construction project for the ESSEC campus in Singapore. ‘I was in charge of the financial part, and notably the negotiations with the Singaporean banks.’

Since 2016, he also took the co-management of the ESSEC Master’s in Finance. Although wanting to progressively pass the relay over the coming years within the various programmes, the Dean’s election shook up his plans. ‘I wanted to stop gradually. But I was approached by several professors who wanted me to stand for election. I thought about it right up until the last moment, then I took the plunge.’

Michel Baroni is motivated by the idea of representing the voice of ‘an international faculty that is full of vitality, involvement, motivation and innovative ideas.’ For him, the professors must ‘support the growth of the school by being at the heart of its strategy.’ From ESSEC he borrows his ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ which has existed, according to him, for some years, and which today is strengthened even more through internationalisation. ‘Today, we have researchers from the whole world. They’ve also got to soak up this culture at ESSEC.’ Since March 10^th 2018, he now devotes his time to these causes. ‘We have excellent professors at ESSEC who have a background of superb academic and pedagogical achievement. We must support them. Both for them, and for the school.’