Love School of Business Dean Raghu Tadepalli had a plan.
He was going to go to Arizona State to pursue his master’s in business administration then hurry back to India to take over his father’s cinema business and return to his wife and son.
However, the course of his life changed when professors in his MBA program took him out to lunch and told him they thought he would be a great fit for a Ph.D. program. He saw this as doable, moved across the country to Virginia Tech and embraced his new path of pursuing higher education.
A Collective Achievement
Entrepreneurship and education have always been in his blood. His father was a lawyer who owned a successful movie theater in southern India, and his mother was a physician. However, his father passed away, and it was expected for Tadepalli to take on the role of new business owner at 23 years old, leaving him no time to grieve.
Also at 24, he got married and emigrated to the U.S. for his master’s.
“Hard work was ingrained in me,” Tadepalli said.
With the diligence he learned at such a young age, he completed his master’s and Ph.D. in three years and nine months. Once Tadepalli decided to stay in the U.S. his wife and son joined him.
While earning his doctorate in marketing, the dean focused his studies on measuring performance when it comes to accomplishing any goal in a workplace setting.
“Performance determines what gets done. If you don't measure it, it doesn't get done,” Tadepalli said. “If you measure it and reward it, but improperly, it gets done only once.”
He also said this is what has helped him be successful as dean. Before coming to Elon, Tadepalli came from a background of marketing and higher education as was Murata Dean and professor of Marketing at the F. W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College.
During his 13 years at Elon, Tadepalli achieved three successful accreditations with no recommendations for improvement, started new majors — such as business analytics, project management and human resource management — and roughly doubled the size of the business school.
According to the Registrar’s Report, the Love School of Business grew from 1,356 students when Tadepalli first came to Elon in 2012 to 2,145 students as of fall 2024.
Tadepalli said some of the best initiatives the business school has implemented throughout his time as dean came from students, such as an updated version of the internship report requirement for business majors.
One memory that stood out to Tadepalli was when he was first up for re-accreditation under the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business in 2014 — this was the first time an accreditation team had zero recommendations for improvement. Tadepalli said he remembers getting a call from Steven House, former associate vice president of academic affairs, who shared how content the former president of the university was with the review and congratulated him.
“What it did was it showed the president and the provost and also my colleagues that, ‘He knows what he’s doing,’” Tadepalli said.
Tadepalli said the success of the business school is attributed not only to himself but to his open-door philosophy.
Director of Operations and Accreditation Kristin Barrier has been by the dean’s side since he first started in July of 2012. She said his open-door policy has done much more than literally leaving the door open. Barrier said he tries to make himself accessible to students and staff as much as possible.
“There's a constant flow of people through the office here, and I think that just really builds a sense of community,” Barrier said. “It encourages collaboration.”
However, Tadepalli said he sees the business school’s accomplishments as everyone’s. He also attributed the school's success to his “outstanding” faculty and staff.
“We are in the people business,” Tadepalli said. “We are in the business of impacting the lives of young people, and we want them to become leaders.”
Big Shoes To Fill
For Tadepalli, joining Elon as dean of the business school felt like a “round peg in a round hole.”
He liked how Elon lived up to its mission and how people valued each other.
With a 1000-watt smile, he said, “It’s a very special place.”
But the door to Tadepalli’s office is closing soon.
“I'm going to miss our conversations and his mentorship,” Barrier said. “More than half my career has been working with him.”
According to the American Conference of Academic Deans, the average time spent as a dean at a university is 5 years or less, which makes Tadepalli a clear outlier. Because of this, he said he hopes whoever fills his shoes knows the importance of growth. One area he said the future dean could focus on is increasing the number of faculty and staff.
“The challenge is not to grow bigger, but also to grow better,” he said.
The Next Chapter
Despite his departure as dean, Tadepalli won’t be gone for long. He will return after a yearlong sabbatical in 2026 and work remotely as dean emeritus and special assistant to Elon University President Connie Book. As of right now, Tadepalli said it’s too far in advance to know the details of what his new role will entail.
Just as his MBA professors saw potential in him, Tadepalli said he tries to apply this value with his students and hopes to be remembered for his transparency.
But moving forward, he has big retirement plans. With his two dogs and a wife of 44 years, Tadepalli plans to move back to where it all began: Arizona.
When Tadepalli embarked to the U.S. in 1982, he didn’t return to India until 1991. He has three older sisters, one who lives in the U.S., but he hadn’t seen his other sisters in nine years.
Diwali, which took place Oct. 31, is a five-day Hindu holiday that celebrates new beginnings and marks the new year in India. During times like these, Tadepalli said he reflects on his choice to stay in the U.S. But now that he is turning to the next chapter of his life, he said he might be able to travel back to his hometown and experience the festival of lights again.
“The India that I remember is the India that I grew up in,” Tadepalli said. “That India doesn’t exist, only in my imagination.”