The Organizational Behavior Teaching Society holds a fabulous conference appropriate for teacher-scholars in many management fields. In June 2009, Jennifer Leigh and I hosted an interactive session lifting up issues surrounding undergraduate business education, and issues facing us as teacher scholars.

Here’s a list of questions and dilemmas we identified in the session.

1. Purpose – what is the purpose of a business education? What is the role of business education at the undergraduate level?

2. Relationship – the business/management and liberal arts relationship appears in different universities as: separate and unequal, separate and complementary, and integrated and blended.

3. Challenges – Faculty working in this integrated area often burn out because they are lone champions of the ideas on their home campuses, and we face biases from faculty in other disciplines about their perceptions of business.

4. Assessment/Accreditation – an obstacle to innovating arises when institutional pressures encourage staying-the-same for accreditation purposes.

5. Balance – how can we engage in both our core research, pedagogical and curricular research and keep ourselves nourished and sane, especially in institutions that value core research over pedagogical research?!

6. Multiple Levels of Literacy – many systemic questions arise around what forms of literacy matter, and matter most (reading, writing, numeric, information discernment, cultural, sustainability or environmental, etc)

7. How to Prioritize – where does a single teacher intervene? A classroom is a limited venue yet more broad initiatives like curricular reform and/or changing campus cultures takes enormous energy and time.

Which ones really capture your attention? What do you see as our collective opportunity? What resources can you recommend to this community?

Mary Grace Neville

A new feature titled "Integrating business and liberal arts: A competency map for understanding the blend" by Dr. Mary Grace Neville was posted on the site today. You can find this article on the "Features" page of the site.

What do you think? Please share your comments.

You do not necessarily expect to find business programs in liberal arts colleges. Undergraduate business programs tend to cultivate job readiness with technical skills and knowledge. Liberal arts programs pride themselves on developing young minds to think critically and be inquisitive. So, to put them together in an academic setting, often feels like going against the grain.

However, imagine the possibilities of what could happen if you did put them together. You might have inquisitive young minds entering a business market place, young minds with not only skills but also the capacity to adapt to our complex and rapidly changing market place, young minds imagining the right new perspectives at the right time. It’s easy to see the need for this today as many of our major systems struggle to adapt and survive; just consider the challenges being faced by the financial, healthcare, educational, and automotive industries.

I’m one of three business faculty at Southwestern University; we wrestle with this issue of how to infuse liberal arts into our business program as we aspire to prepare the next generation. Our program leverages five economics faculty and two accounting faculty in order to graduate about 30 business majors per year, one of the largest majors on our small campus.

Since 2005, I started asking questions about what we were trying to accomplish in our program – questions of how to blend liberal arts and business beyond simply bridging general education requirements with technical courses, how to engage pragmatic business students in philosophical curiosity and theoretical critique, how to teach 18 year olds that history has something valuable to offer the future, and how to young people from a twitter and Facebook culture to look each other in the eye and understand personal communications. I found that many others were asking the same questions with little to no organized or systematized approach for how we might learn from each other and influence our universities as a whole.

This is our chance to work together.

In 2005, we began the discussion with the help and support of the James Kemper Foundation. They recognized the value of supporting a dialog and structure for liberal arts’ emphasis on critical thinking and fostering curiosity in young minds as we teach business. They understood how that could benefit tomorrow’s business world enormously.

Now it’s up to us. Colleagues and I have created this site to inspire, to share, to come together. Since we are creating something new and testing boundaries and conventional thinking, we can come together here to exchange ideas and find resources.

I encourage you to share your experiences with us here. The rest of us are waiting…