Harvard Business School professor emeritus and Harvard Extension School management faculty member Francis J. Aguilar passed away February 17 after a three-year battle with cancer. Aguilar was a general management and ethics expert who taught General Manager’s in Action at Harvard Extension School every fall since 2001, including this last semester, despite his illness.

“Frank Aguilar was a dedicated teacher and very devoted to his students,” says Stephen Greyser, Harvard Business School’s Richard P. Chapman Professor of Business Administration, emeritus, and fellow Harvard Extension School instructor. “His skilled teaching and field-based research informed decades of students and executives on the art of becoming and being a general manager. He was a caring colleague and an exemplary human being.” His students expressed similar sentiments in evaluations from this past fall’s General Manager’s in Action, including praise of Aguilar’s remarkable ethics, knowledge, and honesty.

In 2002, Aguilar delivered the Extension School management program’s Commencement address, “Cleared for Take-Off.” Using flying as a metaphor, the former US naval aviator told graduating students to “do all you can to make your life’s flight reach far and high. Most of us hold our destiny in our own hands.” In 2008, Francis Aguilar received the Joanne Fussa Distinguished Teaching Award for exceptional teaching in business and management.

Read the Harvard Business School’s official obituary.