International ambitions: Pocket-sized Durham aims to stand out as a world leader in business education

Rob Dixon has a naughty sense of humour. "I don't know if you've ever mentioned Durham to people abroad, but they probably think it's in North Carolina," says the dean of the Durham Business School, with an impish grin. The self-deprecating joke might cause more po-faced colleagues to choke on their equations. But Professor Dixon is making a serious point: how can a medium-sized institution such as Durham, albeit a very reputable one, stand out in the increasingly competitive and international world of MBAs?

At 54, he brings heavyweight qualifications to the task. His accent immediately identifies him as a Newcastle lad born and bred. Jokes aside, his passion for the region is unmistakable.

Professor Dixon studied at Leicester University and joined the Durham Business School faculty in 1992. He has published extensively on his specialisms of financial management and performance appraisal, and in 1998 took up the chair of management accounting. Professor Dixon has also been chair of the board of studies and director of the MBA programme. Spells as a visiting professor in Hong Kong, Finland, France and Malaysia have broadened his international horizons.

He became dean in April last year after the school had undertaken an international search. It was not a bolt from the blue. "I had certainly thought about it. I was persuaded by the VC to take the job. I took it because I came from this part of the world and I thought I could help to shape the school and take it to the next stage."

Professor Dixon took over an institution that risked being marooned in the middle ground – neither a niche player nor a global powerhouse. The school is respectably ranked, being placed 28 in Europe and 11 in the UK in the Financial Times rankings.

More specifically, the one-year, full-time MBA was ranked 80 in the world, 22 in Europe and 13 in the UK. But Professor Dixon knows that Durham has to make more of a mark. "My ultimate vision," he says, "is for the school to be clearly a top business school in Europe – which means we need to be in the top 10 per cent when it comes to research outcomes in the UK, and in the top 10 per cent for teaching scores in the UK."

Professor Dixon is well aware, however, that a business school has to run hard to stand still – let alone move up the pecking order. His strategy for the MBA is to build on existing strengths. "We have to recognise that Durham is a fairly small university. That can be an advantage for our MBA students. We tend to be more interdisciplinary." Professor Dixon cites the cross-fertilisation with geographers who understand risk because of their research on tsunamis.

Another strength, he believes, is a longstanding emphasis on ethics in business. "We've tried to give the MBA degree a true sense of social responsibility and it's become much more popular. It's a particularly useful strength at the moment. There's a shift in the attitude of students who are arriving," he says. Then the grin reappears: "Ethics is no longer something you need to get accredited."

Professor Dixon mentions with pride that seven MBA students have chosen for their project to work in Sri Lanka helping a cinnamon plantation.

A third strength is an already strong international outlook. More than two-thirds of the faculty are from outside the UK, and the proportion of all postgraduate students, including those taking masters and doctoral degrees, is even higher. The curriculum has a distinct international flavour as well. "We mustn't teach them the British way of doing things. If I have one criticism of American business schools, it is that they teach the American way of doing things," says Professor Dixon.

In some ways, this might seem a good time to develop the MBA programme. Acceptances for the full-time MBA are running at twice the level at the same time last year. "I've been staggered by the increase in applications for the full-time MBA," says Professor Dixon.

He has also been surprised that applications for the Executive MBA (EMBA) are significantly higher, although the proportion of students being sponsored by their employees has halved to about 20 per cent.

But Durham faces constraints. Competition prevents it from raising fees – £19,000 for the full-time MBA and £16,500 for the two-year EMBA – even if it wanted to. Professor Dixon also does not want to expand the full-time MBA cohort much beyond its current 60 students, believing a larger group risks disrupting the cohesion and dynamics of the class. He does, however, have ambitions to build up the EMBA, the vagaries of the recession permitting, and would like the proportion of women taking MBAs to increase from a third at present.

More strategically, "to be an international school in a regional location is a challenge", admits Professor Dixon. One answer is to strengthen teaching and research. He hopes to increase the faculty from 86 full-time equivalents now to 95 by the end of the year, and to attract more PhD students to spice up research. Another is to push the integration and cross-fertilisation of subjects further, to take more advantage of being part of a larger university. Professor Dixon also wants to build more links with other schools overseas. Durham already offers courses in Dubai and Barbados and has connections with universities in China and Japan.

But helter-skelter growth is hardly Professor Dixon's style. "We have to expand carefully. We need the culture of the place to be coherent," he says. Has he found what he learned and taught about leadership useful? Out comes the grin: "I have to be careful what I say here. I can honestly say that what I've learned and taught has been very useful. But there's a huge difference from what I was doing before. In this job, you have to persuade people to accept a vision. And then there are the interesting HR issues."

It sounds as though he will need to keep his sense of humour.