RIshi Sunak has said that going to business school at Stanford in California changed her life. Stanford “teaches you to think bigger,” he told a venture capital podcast last year. Instead of a “more growth mindset”, studying in the heart of Silicon Valley encouraged it to embrace “a slightly bigger, more dynamic approach to change”, the former UK chancellor said.
While Stanford clearly left its mark on him, it’s less clear whether Sunak made a mark at Stanford, one of the world’s top-ranked business schools. After receiving a Fulbright scholarship to study in the US, he graduated from the two-year MBA program in 2006.
Stanford is a busy place, and a dozen professors and lecturers from that time told the Guardian they had no recollection of teaching the man vying to become the next UK prime minister.
These included teachers in some of the school’s signature courses: Irv Grousbeck, an expert on entrepreneurship; Andy Rachleff, who teaches courses on innovation; Charles O’Reilly, who runs leadership courses; and Carole Robin, one of the Interpersonal Dynamics teachers, a popular choice student referred to as “sensitive.”
When he gave a prestigious lecture at the London business school last year, Sunak, now 42 and also an Oxford University alumnus, quoted one of his “inspirational” Stanford professors, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer , and described Romer’s influence. lecture on innovation. “I don’t remember ever interacting with him,” Romer told the Guardian.
Jeffrey Pfeffer, who teaches a popular course called Pathways to Power, posted on LinkedIn that Sunak had been among his students and that he hoped they would learn lessons about power to “grow into positions where they can have the power to make a difference in the world.”
Asked about any memories of Sunak, Pfeffer said he “didn’t have the bandwidth to answer that question” as he was about to travel.
Another professor, James Van Horne, initially said he had not taught Sunak, but later found a recording of him recorded in one of his corporate finance classes. “He was a good student and attended well, but beyond that I don’t have many memories,” Van Horne wrote.
Robert Joss, dean of the business school at the time, said he barely remembered Sunak but vaguely remembered a “very bright, very good student.” “My impression of all our students was that they are excellent,” said Joss, who retired in 2009.
With roughly 400 students in each graduating class at the business school, Joss said, it wasn’t possible to get to know everyone deeply, and, as administrators, “you remember the students who get in trouble or the students who won the big prizes.”
Sunak was not among the students in his MBA class of 2006 who were given post-graduation awards for being in the top 10% academically, for service to the university, or for contributing to the school’s social culture and sense of fun . Dozens of his classmates did not respond to a request to share memories, or declined to comment.
Sign up to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every weekday morning at 7am BST
Joss said he had a stronger memory of another MBA student in Sunak’s year: Akshata Murty, his future wife, whom he remembered as “very smart, very smart.” Dean knew her parents because NR Narayana Murthy, her father and the billionaire founder of Infosys, was on the advisory council of Stanford’s business school.
It’s common for classmates at Stanford to date and marry, a trend he sees clearly in the alumni magazine, Joss said.
Four years after Murty and Sunak married in Bengaluru in 2009, they made a “generous” donation to Stanford’s business school to fund a fellowship in social innovation. A university spokesman declined to comment on the amount donated.
The couple also gave $3 million to Claremont McKenna, a small private liberal arts college outside Los Angeles where Murty majored in economics and French. She has been a member of Claremont McKenna’s board of trustees since 2011.
Their 2018 donation funded the college’s Murty Sunak Quantitative and Computational Laboratory. The couple said the gift was partly inspired by Murty’s father’s favorite motto: “In God we trust.” And everyone else has to bring data to the table.”
