New Iowa State business dean aims to prepare students to be ‘job-ready’

With a breadth of employment and academic experience spanning the globe and several decades, Raj Agnihotri is uniquely positioned to educate aspiring business leaders, inspire innovation and advance collaboration in an increasingly international marketplace — all from inside what has become his Iowa State University home.

Frequently at the forefront of discovery and development, Agnihotri has grown comfortable in the unavoidable discomfort of breaking new ground, surfacing him in a fast-changing and unsettled economic landscape as the top prospect to lead ISU’s Ivy College of Business into the future.

“Dr. Agnihotri is an accomplished researcher and student-centric leader,” ISU President Wendy Wintersteen said in a May 8 news release unveiling him as the campus’ new business college dean. “He has the experience and vision to advance business education and strengthen our entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem to benefit Iowa’s economy.”

Agnihotri succeeds his friend and colleague David Spalding, whose tenure started over a decade ago in 2013 — making him the longest-serving business dean in ISU history.

In 2023, Spalding added to his duties and titles that of vice president for economic development and industry relations. But, in announcing a national search for his replacement, ISU in September said it would pull apart the two positions he held to be separate going forward.

A search committee considered a wide net of applicants for the business college dean post — bringing to campus finalists from Texas Tech University, Oakland University and the University of Iowa — but ended up with its top internal candidate in Agnihotri.

“I was not in the market. I was not applying other places,” Agnihotri said about learning he had been nominated to continue Spalding’s vision. “That was very very exciting. It was not just the dean position, but being a successor of David Spalding. That was a powerful attraction for me.”

‘The man with the vision’

It was Spalding’s student-centered vision for the college that first attracted Agnihotri to visit ISU in 2017 — when he was the inaugural John Merrill Endowed Professor in Consultative Sales at the University of Texas-Arlington.

Agnihotri was in his home nation of India giving a seminar that summer when he popped onto the radar of an ISU PhD graduate in the audience. That student knew his alma mater was looking for a sales researcher and called the campus to suggest Agnihotri.

“One of the senior faculty members reached out to me,” he said. “I was impressed. And they said, just visit us, because I was not in the market.”

Agnihotri made his first trip to Iowa on a perfect fall day in Ames — homecoming, in fact — when the Cyclones beat Texas Christian University by a touchdown and “everybody was happy.”

“And then I met David Spalding — the man with the vision,” Agnihotri said. “And I was able to see what he was trying to show me. And he excited me. And here we are.”

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When asked to describe the vision Spalding shared, Agnihotri said, “He had the clarity in his thoughts about a couple of things that I always saw as very important for higher education.”

For starters, he said, “anything and everything we do should somehow prepare our students to be job-ready.”

Through ever-expanding curricula, programs and initiatives, Spalding aimed to connect ISU to area businesses and Iowa’s economy while keeping top of mind the mission of training employable students — capable of building relationships, of handling pressure and of communicating well.

“And I saw that in his eyes,” Agnihotri said of his first visit. “And I said, ‘Well if that is the case, I would love to build something here.’”

‘A new position’

ISU took that sentiment literally in 2018 when it hired Agnihotri to establish and serve as founding director of its inaugural Ivy Sales Forum — which works with corporate partners to advance professional sales education and provides students with real-world experiential learning opportunities.

In creating the forum, Agnihotri brought in 18 organizations — including several he’s done work for previously, like Kent Corp. and Vermeer, and others like Cargill, GreatAmerica and Principal.

Over his time leading the forum, corporations pledged more than $600,000 — contributing to a $270,000 annual revenue stream. And since 2022, the forum has awarded more than $200,000 in scholarships — developing and launching the first undergraduate professional sales certificate in Iowa.

This spring, ISU boasts 374 sales certificate students, compared with 10 in spring 2021.

And last year Agnihotri was named to this third-straight inaugural post as assistant dean for industry engagement in the ISU business college.

“This is a new position in the college,” the campus reported at the time, touting Agnihotri as a “global authority in digital mediation within business-to-business marketing and sales processes.”

“One of our strategic priorities, along with teaching and research, is engagement with the business community,” Spalding said at the time. “This is where Raj really shines. He is a leader in building and strengthening industry relationships.”

‘Make a place better’

Industry is where Agnihotri started his career in the 1990s in India, where he was born and raised in the capital city of Lucknow — a four-hour drive from the Taj Mahal — later attending the University of Pune in western India, where he earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering.

“From there I went to work with businesses ranging from startup ventures to major corporations,” Agnihotri said of his time with Zenith Computers Ltd. in New Delhi, the Fortune 500 Tata Infotech Ltd., and companies that were distributors of Cisco and IBM.

Educated in engineering, Agnihotri said he learned the business ropes the hard way — “by doing it.”

“At the same time, I always felt that a proper business education was missing,” he said. “I just wanted to polish myself, just upgrade myself, and where else do you go for an MBA and business education, especially in 2000? The destination was the U.S.”

Agnihotri launched his foray into American higher education in 2003 at Oklahoma City University, earning a Master of Business Administration and management, followed by a doctorate in marketing from Kent State University in Ohio in 2009.

“It may sound cheesy, but it is exactly true what happened,” Agnihotri said about what snared him into a longer higher ed stay. “I met a professor.”

Dr. Thomas Brown — who since has been inducted into the Oklahoma Higher Education Heritage Society Hall of Fame as former Oklahoma City University business dean — derailed Agnihotri’s plan to return to India.

“I think I can blame it on Dr. Tom Brown,” he said. “I fell in love with business, academics, research, being a student, the campus, everything.”

At Kent State, where Agnihotri continued his education as a PhD student, he began his teaching career as a marketing fellow and advanced through the ranks of assistant professor to associate professor of marketing and sales leadership at Ohio University — where he landed his first administrative role as chair of the marketing department.

His last stop before ISU was the University of Texas-Arlington, where he held the founding endowed professorship charged with establishing a sales program.

And five years after starting ISU’s new Ivy Sales Forum in 2018, in 2023 he was appointed to lead Ivy’s new custom education program offering noncredit executive education to businesses and organizations in Iowa.

A year later in 2024, Agnihotri earned the title of Morrill professor — bestowed on an ISU faculty member “with outstanding success in teaching/learning and/or extension/outreach programs.”

Although Agnihotri acknowledged he has big shoes to fill, Spalding won’t be too far away — staying on part-time in the second half of his dual role as vice president for economic development and industry relations.

“One of the reasons for jumping into this race was because I've worked very closely with David Spalding, and I learned from him,” Agnihotri said, citing a range of leadership lessons Spalding has imparted — including his “authentic and true intentions to make a place better.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com