John H. McArthur | National Coalition on Health Care

Dean Emeritus, Harvard Business School

John H. McArthur was Dean of the Faculty, Harvard Business School, from 1980 through 1995.  He was a member of the Harvard Business School faculty from 1962, where he taught courses in corporate finance and related fields in several school programs while also engaging in research and course development in Europe and North America.  In 1973, McArthur was appointed the Sylvan C. Coleman Professor of Financial Management, and in 1980, the George F. Baker Professor of Business Administration.  From 1996 to 2005 he served as Senior Advisor to the President of The World Bank.

A native of Vancouver, British Columbia, McArthur earned the Bachelor of Commerce degree in Forestry from the University of British Columbia in 1957.  At the Harvard Business School, he completed the MBA degree in 1959 and earned a doctorate there in business administration in 1963.  He has held numerous corporate directorships, committee memberships, and consulting posts in business, government, education and health care organizations around the world over the decades. He has served in numerous roles over the years for the Mayor of the City of Boston.  For many years, he served as chair of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Following the affiliation of Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General Hospital, he was founding Co-chair of the Board of Trustees of Partners HealthCare System, Inc.  He is currently a director the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada (Chairman); Bell Canada; Bell Canada Enterprises; the Center for Surgery and Public Health at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Boston; Development Gateway; Duke University Health System; e-Rewards; Koç Holdings, A.S., Istanbul; Reuters Founders Share Trust Company Limited, London; and Telesat Canada.

McArthur has also served on the boards of overseers of several other organizations including The Anti-Defamation League; Brandeis International Business School; Canada 2020; Fondation Jean Monnet pour L’Europe, Lausanne, Switzerland; International Institute for Management Development, Lausanne, Switzerland; Koç University, Istanbul; National Coalition on Health Care; The Netherlands School of Business, Nijenrode; Nomura School of Finance and Business Studies, Japan; Partners In Health; Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan; and both the Graduate School and the Business School of the University of British Columbia.

McArthur has received Distinguished Alumni awards from Burnaby South High School and the University of British Columbia.  He has also been awarded honorary doctorates from Middlebury College, Queens University, Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia, the University of Western Ontario, and the University of Navarra in Spain, and he is an Honorary Citizen of the town of Remauville in France.. Other awards have included a Management Achievement Award, McGill University; Harvard Statesman Award, from the Harvard Business School Club in New York; and a Canadian Business Leadership Award, from the combined HBS Clubs of Canada.  He was named as a Lifetime Trustee at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 1996. The John and Netilia McArthur University Professorship was established at Harvard University in 1997.  McArthur Hall was dedicated at Harvard Business School in 1999 in recognition of his contributions at Harvard University. And a group of Canadian HBS alumni announced the creation of the John H. McArthur Canadian Fellowship program in 2002.