McClain led the 10-campus University of Hawai‘i System from 2004-2009 and served as vice president of academic affairs from 2003-2004.
He was a tenured faculty member and finance department chair at Boston University and the first director of its Management Development Program-Japan.
He has taught at the MIT Sloan School of Management and at Universidad Gabriela Mistral in Santiago, Chile and has been a visiting scholar at Keio and Meiji Universities in Japan.
He is the author of Apocalypse on Wall Street, a number of scholarly articles and hundreds of columns on economic issues.
In 2007, McClain received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.