MIT Sloan’s New Dean Is Ready to Tackle Threats to Higher Ed

When he was 14 years old and reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Richard Locke grew so outraged over the mistreatment of farm workers that he stormed down to his local supermarket and joined a picket line.

A half-century later, as he adjusts to his new role as the dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, Locke’s youthful idealism—and his restlessness and big vision—are still intact. A lean and energetic overachiever who hits the gym each morning at 6, Locke speaks with zeal of the “persistent local and global challenges affecting nearly every aspect of the human condition” and vows to help Sloan’s “brilliant, curious students” address urgent global problems, like climate change, the ethical riddle of artificial intelligence and the shortcomings of our health-care system.