Contact: Joe Farris
The dean of the College of Business Administration at the University of Houston is being named to lead Mississippi State's College of Business and Industry.
Sara M. Freedman, a dean at Houston since 1995 and a faculty member at the Texas university since 1976, will assume her new duties at Mississippi State in mid-August.
She currently heads a college enrolling more than 4,800 undergraduate and graduate business students and housing 12 centers and institutes for research and service. She was associate dean for academic and research programs 1985-95.
"Dr. Freedman has the wide professional contacts, the experience and the energy to lead our College of Business and Industry to new levels of productivity and service," said President Malcolm Portera. "She has a solid record of leadership at Houston and she provides significant new strength to the team that we are building."
As dean, Freedman guided Houston's business school through a recent reaccreditation by the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business.
She is a member of the board of directors of the Graduate Management Admission Council, which oversees the Graduate Management Admission Test. The GMAT is used nationwide in business school admissions decisions and is the first standardized test to use a computer adaptive test exclusively.
Freedman also is a member of the board of governors of the 300,000-member Beta Gamma Sigma national business honor society.
At Houston, she initiated an off-campus one-year program for executives seeking a master's degree in business administration. She also oversaw expanding enrollment in a professional MBA program and developed a proposal for an Internet-based MBA program.
Freedman, a native of North Carolina, received a Ph.D. in business administration from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1976, the same year she joined the University of Houston faculty as an assistant professor. She holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Boston University.
Mississippi State's College of Business and Industry, which includes the School of Accountancy, enrolls about 2,400 undergraduate and graduate students. Freedman succeeds Harvey Lewis, who retired at the end of 1997 to enter private business.
Formal approval of Freedman's appointment is expected later this month at the regular meeting of the Board of Trustees, Institutions of Higher Learning.