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With his wife, Bobbie, his son, Alex, and his granddaughter, Charlotte, in the classroom, Bob Bruner recently orchestrated what is likely the case study of his career.

Without a suit jacket, just a blue shirt and a red tie, as he had always done thousands of times before, he used a pair of old blackboards and plenty of chalk to distill the lessons of a leadership challenge drawn from a cold-called group of alumni.

You know from history that every once in a while someone comes along to make a true difference in this world of ours. This month one humble person who made that difference will retire from an extraordinary professional life.

Robert Bruner, who taught for 41 years at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and expertly guided the school through a formative time as dean for ten years, is one of those remarkable individuals. With a mother who was an English professor and a father who once was president of  Greyhound Van Lines Inc., Bruner went off to Yale for his undergraduate degree and then to Harvard Business School for his MBA and a doctorate in finance.

He arrived at Darden from, as current Dean Scott Beardsley noted in introducing his predecessor, “the Darden of the North.” Bruner came with a passion for teaching, the first faculty member at Darden to show up with an Apple 2e computer.

He was the first business school leader Poets&Quants chose to honor with its Dean of the Year award in 2011. And with good reason. As dean, starting in 2005 through 2015, Bruner chartered or led a series of initiatives that prompted the revision of Darden’s full-time MBA program, launched Darden’s Executive MBA and Global Executive MBA programs, raised the profile of admitted students, led the hiring of many new faculty and staff, improved the diversity of the Darden community, raised over $165 million in new funds and saw Darden’s rankings rise to the Top 10 of U.S. schools.

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