News > October 25, 2007

By Kevin Koehler | Online editor

The university has formed a committee to lead a national search for a new dean of business who will run both the Calloway School of Business and Accountancy and the Babcock Graduate School of Management. The 12 committee members, appointed and chaired by Provost Jill Tiefenthaler, include three Calloway and three Babcock faculty members, along with Dean of the Law School Blake Morant and other administrators. They aim to make a selection by July 2008.

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Outside Worell Professional Center, the home of Babcock, soon to be led by a new dean who will oversee both it and the Calloway school. (Sophie Mullinax/Old Gold & Black)

This is the first step in the realignment of the two schools announced Sept. 26.

“The common misconception is that this is a merger of the two schools, and it’s not,” said J. Kline Harrison, an associate dean at Calloway.

“It’s kind of like a joint appointment … In this case, you have the dean of Babcock and the dean of Calloway rolled into one.”

While the new dean’s office will replace both current deans, the business schools are to remain distinct institutions with largely separate administrations.

“It’s an unusual model,” he said.

It’s a unique move for an already unique pair of institutions.

Nearly all of the nation’s universities operate graduate and undergraduate business offerings as a single program, the one notable exception to this common format being the University of Virginia.

And among the university’s smaller-sized peers, many, such as Duke University and Vanderbilt University, do not even offer undergraduate majors explicitly in business.

Calloway is one of only five schools in Business Week’s list of top 40 undergraduate programs with an enrollment of less than 500.

The creation of a new dean’s office is unlikely to have much practical effect on current students before their graduation, officials say.

According to an e-mail current Babcock Dean Jack Wilkerson sent to his students on the day the change was announced, degrees and class requirements will not change for those already enrolled in Calloway.

“I do not anticipate any immediate changes that will affect your experience here,” he wrote.

It’s unclear at present what exactly the move will mean. To be sure, the potential for broader change exists on the horizon, but its shape and scope remain unknown.

Any administrative shuffles or reforms will happen under the leadership of the new dean of business, who will not take office until summer 2008 at the earliest.

“It will be the new dean’s decision as to how he or she wants to structure the administrations within each of the separate schools,” said Wilkerson.

Calloway students first learned of a change along these lines during last school year.

Some have expressed apprehensions that a melding of the schools could mean a smaller share of resources for undergraduates and a weakening of Calloway’s reputation, which is thought to be stronger than Babcock’s. “There’s some concern. People are worried it will make our degree less valuable, hurt our rankings,” said Bryant Goodman, a senior finance major.

Though both Babcock and Calloway have received good rankings, Calloway’s are more outstanding.

It was ranked Business Week’s 17th best and U.S. News’ 27th best undergraduate business program. In 2006, its graduates who took the Certified Public Accounting exam had the highest passage rate in the country, a distinction they’ve earned five times in the last decade.

Babcock, on the other hand, is listed as the 38th best MBA program in the nation by Business Week magazine.

It is also ranked 49th best by U.S. News and World Report.

This year, Babcock was also named by the Wall Street Journal as the second best among regional schools, a tier for those business programs that “tend to draw many of their recruiters from local regions.”

“Some of the concerns that people may be feeling aren’t necessary because we’re not losing the Calloway name,” Harrison said.

“We’re not losing the focus on undergraduate education. Calloway will continue to be recognized as a leader.”

“Both the Calloway and Babcock Schools have developed distinctive areas of strength and expertise in which we all take great pride,” Tiefenthaler wrote in a statement about the realignment of the two business schools.