In the span of a few months last spring, some of the most admired and powerful leaders of American business interacted with the Stern community: Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, former Treasury Secretary and current Chairman of the Executive Committee at Citigroup Robert Rubin, retired General Electric CEO Jack Welch, and New York Stock Exchange Chairman Dick Grasso.

Our location in the middle of the world’s financial capital surely helps attract such luminaries. But I would like to think that our reputation as one of the world’s top business schools also helps to attract a steady flow of the best and brightest students, faculty, and practitioners to our campus.

The give-and-take between executives, students, faculty, and key government officials both enriches the overall environment at Stern and reflects an essential engagement with the world we study. Such engagement is particularly crucial at a time when there is widespread questioning of some of the fundamental assumptions of our economic system. Events of the past few years – whether it was the bursting of the Internet stock bubble or the Enron and Worldcom scandals – have rightly set off a wide-ranging effort to assess the legacy and impact of what came to be know as the New Economy.

As an economist, I have my own perspective on questions relating to the New Economy. But as readers of this issue of Sternbusiness will find, our understanding can be enhanced greatly by turning to other disciplines: accounting, management, and finance, to name just three. The articles in this issue not only represent a broad range of disciplines, but also a broad range of contributors.

As a faculty member turned Dean, I find this sort of participation particularly gratifying. For it shows that there exists at Stern a widespread commitment to using scholarly techniques to analyze real-world issues, and to do so in a language and format that is accessible to a broad audience. Here, probing research is not simply a means for faculty to burnish their resumes; it lies at the core of what we do as teachers and colleagues.

In recent months, much of the debate and discussion on topics such as accounting reform and corporate governance has been couched in the language of politics, retribution, and punishment, and delivered in sound-bites. But I firmly believe that as members of an academic community, one of our roles is to seek answers to questions in a dispassionate manner and in a way that relies heavily on sound data and theoretical analysis. We can also play a constructive role in society by using the understanding thus gained to propose solutions and best practices.

This issue, then, encapsulates much of what makes me so excited about Stern. It is filled with diverse contributors, promotes incisive analysis based on both research and experience, and seeks answers to some of the toughest questions we face.

Thomas Cooley
Dean