People and Places: January 5, 2021

Transitions

In March, Stéphane Brutus becomes the new dean of the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management in Ontario, Canada. He is currently a professor in motivation and employee performance at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, where he also served as interim dean from 2015 to 2017. Before joining the Molson School, he was a visiting professor at the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Brazil and at the Instituto de Empresa in Spain. Brutus will replace François Julien, who was dean from 2010 from 2020, and Wojtek Michalowski, who has been interim dean since the summer of 2020.

Citing its new vision for offering transformative business education, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts has selected Debora Jackson as the next dean of the Robert A. Foisie Business School. Jackson has a doctorate of ministry in leadership as well as master’s degrees in divinity, management, and manufacturing engineering. In 2017, she was named the inaugural director of lifelong learning at Yale Divinity School. She has also served as a member of WPI’s board of trustees since 2012. Her term began January 1, 2021.

Honors and Awards

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) has announced the recipient of its 2020 Diana Forsythe Award. The award honors either a peer-reviewed AMIA paper published in the Proceedings of the Annual Symposium or a peer-reviewed article published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association or other journals publishing medical informatics-related content. This year, the award went to the co-authors of "Electronic Health Records Implementation in Morocco: Challenges of Silo Efforts and Recommendations for Improvements," which was published in the International Journal of Medical Informatics. It was written by Rachida F. Parks, associate professor of computer information systems in the School of Business at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut; the late Rolf T. Wigand of the Emeritus College at Arizona State University in Tempe; Mohammed Bennani Othmani and Zineb Serhier of the Université Hassan II de Casablanca in Morocco; and Omar Bouhaddou of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. (Photo of Rachida Parks by Autumn Driscoll of Quinnipiac University)

New Programs

In 2021, the University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) in Johannesburg, South Africa, will launch a master’s of philosophy in change leadership designed to help leaders drive change in a digitally disruptive world. The course combines content that focuses on managing change at the organizational level as well as developing personal competencies to handle change holistically. The goal is to develop human-centric leaders who are able to manage change in a wide variety of situations.

The Saunders College of Business at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York has revamped its curriculum to put more emphasis on industry relevance and technology. A revised MS in global supply chain management gives students more hands-on experience as they develop data-driven decision-making skills. An updated MS in technology innovation management and entrepreneurship gives students real-life business exposure and access to the school’s Venture Creations incubator, a rapid-prototyping lab, and the Simone Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The school also plans to develop a STEM-certified MBA and PhD program. In addition, the school has launched two new minors for undergraduates, one in business analytics and one in human resource management.

Collaborations

Six business schools from around the world have formed the B2M–Bachelor-to-Master alliance to make it simpler for undergraduates from member universities to apply to master’s degree programs at schools within the network. Founding members of the B2M network include ESSEC Business School in France and Singapore, IE Business School in Spain, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University in Canada, the University of Mannheim Business School in Germany, and the Warwick Business School in the United Kingdom. Interested students at member schools can apply for a “B2M Passport,” which enables them to apply to master’s programs at two schools within the network. The network provides individual support, a waiver of application fees, and advantages such as a guaranteed invitation to an admission interview. Between 20 and 30 students will be selected from each school. B2M Passport holders apply online to their schools of choice and must go through admissions processes at their target schools.

Research and education company John Wiley and Sons is collaborating with Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester as the school redesigns its online MBA. The revised program will allow learners to complete the 30-credit online program in about one year for less than 19,000 USD. Wiley has worked with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) to map several of the program’s core business courses to professional certificates and badges in platforms like Microsoft Excel and Tableau, as well as to skills such as emotional intelligence.

Adelphi University’s Robert B. Willumstad School of Business in Garden City, New York, is partnering with the Hochschule Fresenius University of Applied Sciences in Germany for a Trans-Atlantic Virtual Exchange and Collaboration. The program, which involves faculty from both institutions, will enable graduate students from the two schools to meet in virtual classrooms and collaborate on joint projects. The pilot phase of the collaboration is being funded by a German federal grant designed to foster international educational exchanges; the schools plan to continue the program after the initial year’s funding.

Grants and Donations

The Gabelli School of Business at Fordham University in New York, New York, has received a 35 million USD gift from investor Mario J. Gabelli and his wife, Regina Pitaro, both alumni. The donation, made by the Gabelli Foundation, is the single largest in the history of Fordham University, superseding the naming gift Gabelli gave 10 years ago. The money will go toward enhancing the MBA and PhD programs, providing scholarships to MBA and PhD students, and supporting teaching. It also will be used to expand the school’s student-managed investment fund program, in which junior and senior finance students manage more than 1 million USD from Fordham’s endowment. Gabelli is chairman and CEO of GAMCO Investors Inc.; Pitaro is a trustee fellow of Fordham.

Gifts from alumni John W. Glynn Jr. and Barbara A. Glynn will enable the University of Virginia in Charlottesville to endow three new professorships. At the Darden School of Business, the donation will create the Glynn Chair in Venture Capital Fund. The Glynn gift will also support endowed chairs within the School of Law and the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The donations received matching funds through the Bicentennial Professors Fund, resulting in a total of 10 million USD. John Glynn, who is chief executive officer of Glynn Capital Management, is also the MacAvoy Professor of Business Administration at Darden, where he has taught a venture capital course for more than 30 years.

The University of Georgia in Atlanta has received a 10 million USD pledge from Chick-fil-A Inc. to expand the Institute for Leadership Advancement (ILA) at the Terry College of Business. Chick-fil-A’s pledge is the largest commitment dedicated to academic support in the history of the business school. The gift will allow the ILA Leadership Fellows program to welcome a new cohort of undergraduates each fall and spring semester, instead of once a year. It also will enable the ILA to expand and deliver leadership class offerings to all students at the school, as well as support a new annual professional development symposium for the business community.

A 5 million USD gift from the Crews Family Foundation has resulted in the naming of the Crews School of Accountancy in the Fogelman College of Business and Economics at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. The school also plans to use the money to create a new Center for Emerging Technologies in Accounting. Hilliard Crews, the founder of Shelby Group International and president of the Crews Family Foundation, and his wife, Harriet, have made previous gifts to establish the Crews Center for Entrepreneurship and invest in academic and athletic programs.

Other News

The University of Miami Herbert Business School in Florida has created the COVID Career Advancement Relief Plan, which will provide scholarships to prospective graduate business students. The scholarships, which collectively total up to 1 million USD, are geared toward incoming students, recent graduates, and local professionals who want to pursue master’s degrees while their careers continue to be disrupted by the pandemic.

The Florida International University College of Business in Miami has launched FIU Business Press as an imprint of independent book publisher Mango Publishing. The new imprint, which is being spearheaded by the college’s Office of Executive Education, is designed to bring practical business expertise to a wide general audience. Jackie Sousa, director of operations for FIU Business Executive Education, hopes to use FIU’s proceeds from book sales to promote entrepreneurship programming and create initiatives that focus on business ownership. In November, FIU Business Press published its first book, Finance Secrets of Billion-Dollar Entrepreneurs, written by Dileep Rao, a clinical professor in the school’s department of international business.

City, University of London in the United Kingdom has announced that its Business School will no longer be known as Cass Business School. The decision was taken by City’s Council last summer, following a broad consultation about the fact that some of the wealth obtained by the school’s namesake Sir John Cass was obtained through his links to the slave trade. The school had been renamed 18 years ago following a donation from the Sir John Cass Foundation. The council determined that continued use of the Cass name was incompatible with City’s values of diversity and inclusion. For now, the School will be referred to as City’s Business School while consultations about a new name are set in motion.