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Stanford-ESAN
40 Years of Cooperation
More than 40 years ago, the Stanford Business School created the first graduate management school in South America, called ESAN (Escuela de Administración de Negocios para Graduados). Today ESAN, headquartered near Lima, Peru, has graduated more than 4,000 MBAs and welcomed more than 50,000 executive education participants. A full-fledged university that also awards doctorates, it boasts 32 tenure-track faculty and another 100 teachers and operates programs throughout Peru and the world.
Alan B. Coleman, PhD '60, who became ESAN's founding dean in 1963, was back on the Peruvian campus in July to receive the school's first honorary doctorate. The award was part of ESAN's celebration after being elevated to university status by the Peruvian government. “This school has just been a tremendous success,” said Coleman, who has written a book about its founding. “Today they're worldwide with programs in Asia and Europe and expanding into other parts of the world.”
The idea for ESAN was fostered by President John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress program launched in the 1960s to support economic development in Latin America. Coleman and three other Stanford Business School faculty members, Gail Oxley, Ezra Solomon, and Jack Ewing, were sent to Peru by then Dean Ernie Arbuckle to do a feasibility study of creating a graduate business program there. A short while later the Business School was given U.S. government funds to help start the school with the goal of turning it over to a totally Peruvian faculty in a few years.
 Coleman and his family arrived in Lima in 1963, less than one year before the school was scheduled to open. Peru was governed by a military government that had not yet granted the school legal status. The decree establishing the school was granted two days before the government was turned over to elected leaders who would have begun negotiations all over again.
Coleman succeeded in recruiting a faculty, including Frank Shallenberger, Lyle Jacobsen, and Robert Rehder of the GSB but was still debating what to call the new school. The Spanish name was too cumbersome, he worried, and so Coleman proposed ESCAN. An embarrassed Peruvian assistant finally warned him that in Spanish the word could mean “It's a dog.” He dropped the C and created ESAN.
Then there was the problem of students. Although locals said Peruvians do things at the last minute, Coleman was worried when two months before the scheduled inauguration the school had only a dozen viable applicants. He watched in amazement a week before the deadline as a steady stream of hopefuls arrived to fill out applications. By the inauguration on May 30,1964, the school boasted a full entering class of 50 qualified students.
Coleman served for three years and was succeeded by two other American academic deans before leadership was turned over to Peruvian academics in 1970. What started out in a rented building today covers 20 acres and an equal number of buildings, including one of the largest business libraries in South America.
(Reprinted from.the Stanford Business School magazine)
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