News > October 4, 2007

By Caitlin Brooks | Contributing writer

In accordance with the university’s long-term strategic plan, the administration has announced the realignment of the Calloway School of Business and Accountancy and the Babcock Graduate School of Management.

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Students exit Kirby Hall, home of the undergraduate Calloway School, on Oct. 3. (Sophie Mullinax/Old Gold & Black)

Calloway School is currently headed by Dean Jack Wilkerson and the Babcock School by Dean Ajay Patel. Starting next year, the two schools will operate under a single dean whom Provost Jill Tiefenthaler will appoint.

“It will be the new dean’s responsibility to think and plan strategically for business and management education--to capitalize on our strengths, promote collaboration in teaching and scholarship and create innovative opportunities to ensure that our students have the most comprehensive and forward-looking experience possible,” Tiefenthaler said in a press release.

“Both the Calloway and Babcock Schools have developed distinctive areas of strength and expertise in which we all take great pride,” Tiefenthaler said. The new initiative is merely a conduit through which to capitalize on these strengths. “The school wants to increase synergies that can be found by combining certain areas of the two schools,” said Yvonne Hinson, associate professor and director of graduate studies in accounting at Calloway. “They want to increase collaboration in research, and I suppose if any faculty were interested, there would be cross-teaching opportunities.”

Though the plan marks the official start to collaboration between Calloway and Babcock, the two schools have been working together in various ways for years.

“Accounting already works with Babcock,” Hinson said. “In the last year, we have organized a way for our students to take classes at both schools. They just indicate interest in a course at Babcock and then we send their information along to the registrar at Babcock and vice versa.”

Business professor Umit Akinc oversees the Calloway half of the formal Calloway Babcock Research Workshops. Over the last six years, the workshops have allowed Calloway and Babcock professors to intermingle while learning about research projects their peers are performing.

“The program is about collaboration, but it is more than that,” she said. “They allow members of faculty from both sides to know what their colleges are doing in terms of research. They can help each other by critiquing the work. The more critique and positive criticism, the more likely a paper will be published.” In this way, the collaboration between the schools allows faculty to learn as well.

Another program, IAAB, or “It’s All About Business,” brings together about 50 or so students from around the country to “whet their appetite for business” and encourage enrollment in the university’s MBA program. It involves staff from both the Calloway and Babcock schools.

“A less obvious but by far more important collaboration takes place in joint research,” Akinc said.

Professors from the graduate and undergraduate schools often team up to do independent research projects. For example, Akinc frequently works with Professor Jack Meredith of the Babcock School on various activities. With all the collaboration already occurring, many questioned why an administrative alignment was necessary at all.

Most students in the Calloway school refused to comment on the issue and only one agreed to speak anonymously.

“The administration did not consider what students had to say,” the student said. “There were a couple of forums on this topic last year, open forums to talk about your opinion, and from people who went, they didn’t really listen to them. I’d say that a majority of students opposed the move. Some even felt the value of a Calloway degree, and the name would go down, but I’m not sure how valid that argument is.”

However, the statistics show these concerns to be unfounded. The Babcock School is ranked in each of the five major graduate business school surveys – Business Week, Financial Times, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal and U.S. News & World Report. The school ranks second among the nation’s best regional business schools in The Wall Street Journal for 2007. The Calloway School ranks equally high. It is 17th among nearly 100 undergraduate business programs in the United States, according to the 2007 Business Week rankings report.

“Wake Forest is one of only a few national universities that still administers undergraduate and graduate business programs entirely separately,” according to the press release.

Business Week’s 2007 No. 1 Business School is the University of Virgina, which shares the university’s split business model.