Teng-Kee Tan, former dean of the Bloch School of Management, dies

Teng-Kee Tan, former dean of the Bloch School of Management at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, died Tuesday morning in Seattle.

The current dean, David Donnelly, announced the news in an email Tuesday night to faculty and staff. He said the school had learned of the death from Yung-Hern Tan, who said his father died peacefully with his family around him.

Tan, in his 60s, was an American citizen born in Malaysia and raised in Singapore. In an interview with The Star in 2010, Tan said he was inspired to come to Kansas City because of entrepreneurial success stories here and because of Edgar Snow, a journalist from Kansas City who went to China in the 1930s and interviewed Mao Zedong.

Tan became dean of the Bloch School in 2009 and was dean the following year when it lost its top 25 ranking from the Princeton Review for its graduate entrepreneurship program. In 2011 he wrote an email to school administrators urging them to improve the rankings “by all means necessary.”

The Princeton Review this year stripped the school of four subsequent years of top 25 rankings after it was learned that false information was submitted with the school’s applications.

Tan leaves his wife, Hai-Mee, and children, Yung-Hern and Sue Tan Toyofuku.

This story was originally published May 12, 2015 at 8:19 PM with the headline "Teng-Kee Tan, former dean of the Bloch School of Management, dies."