Chair Established to Honor Professor Van Horne
October 2009
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS —Alumni and friends of Professor James C. Van Horne have established an endowed chair in his honor.
Van Horne, who began teaching at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1965, has served as a mentor and role model to many. When students honored him for a second distinguished teaching award in 1997, he estimated that he had already had about 7,000 students pass through his door. Two alumni, at their class reunion in 2003, decided it was time to start the fund to endow the chair in his honor. Since then, Van Horne's colleagues, friends, and many other former students have contributed.
Now the A. P. Giannini Professor of Banking and Finance, Emeritus, Van Horne is best known to scholars for his work on the theory and behavior of interest rates, corporate finance, capital budgeting decisions, and the valuation of market instruments. He is the author of more than 60 articles and 5 books, 3 of which – Financial Management Policy, Fundamentals of Financial Management, and Financial Market Rates and Flows – are in wide use as texts.
He may be better known to former students for his classroom demeanor and accessibility beyond graduation. His legendary cold-calling technique prompted some alumni to turn the tables on him for a May 2005 Stanford Business story in which they asked him their toughest finance questions.