Michael D. Hartline became the sixth dean of the Florida State University College of Business on April 1, 2016. As dean, he leads an amazing family of faculty, staff, students and alumni along the college's "Path to Preeminence." Virtually every program ranks in the Top 25 of public schools, with most in the Top 20 and two in the Top 5. He is committed to improving academic programs, enhancing the student experience and moving forward with fundraising goals, including Legacy Hall, the college's new home.

In 2022, Florida State University President Richard McCullough appointed Hartline to serve as interim vice president for university advancement and interim executive vice president and president of the FSU Foundation. He split his time between the offices of the FSU Foundation and the College of Business during the search to find a permanent successor.

Before assuming his current position of dean, he served as interim dean for nine months where he initiated a revision of the college's strategic plan to establish goals and metrics that better align the college toward preeminence and the university's priority of becoming a Top 15 public institution. As interim dean, he also played a major role in securing a $100 million gift from Jan Moran and The Jim Moran Foundation to further expand the Jim Moran Institute for Global Entrepreneurship and establish the Jim Moran College of Entrepreneurship, the largest independent, interdisciplinary entrepreneurship school of its kind in the nation.

As the college's associate dean for strategic initiatives from 2011 to 2015, he was responsible for external relations, marketing/branding, executive education and strategic programs. He was involved in strategic planning and innovation and had oversight of many fiscal matters and operations, including technology infrastructure and the physical plant. He served as chair of the College of Business Building Program Committee, acting as liaison to university administration and the broader community.

From 2006 to 2011 serving as chair of the college's Department of Marketing, he worked to enhance private funding, implemented shared governance, established formal faculty evaluation and merit guidelines, created an annual strategic planning process and launched a major in professional sales and a Master of Science in Marketing program.

Before coming to Florida State, he was an associate professor of marketing at Samford University's Brock School of Business from 1999 to 2001, assistant professor of marketing at Louisiana State University's E.J Ourso College of Business from 1994 to 1999 and assistant professor of marketing and advertising at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock's College of Business from 1992 to 1994.

Dean Hartline has authored or co-authored numerous books and articles, including several publications in top-tier journals. He has served on the editorial review boards of several academic journals, made numerous presentations to industry and academic audiences and co-chaired two international conferences for the American Marketing Association. He is the former vice president of development for the Academy of Marketing Science. He has won numerous teaching and research awards, has taught MBA courses in marketing strategy and corporate reputation management, and taught undergraduate courses in services marketing and retailing. He also has served as a consultant to several for-profit and nonprofit organizations in the areas of marketing plan development, market feasibility analysis, customer satisfaction measurement, customer service training and pricing policy. His research interests include customer-contact issues in service delivery, service quality and productivity, new service development and non-ownership consumption.

Dean Hartline earned a Ph.D. in business administration from the Fogelman College of Business and Economics at the University of Memphis, and an MBA and bachelor's in marketing, both from Jacksonville State University (Alabama).