Summer session: faculty attend conference on business and liberal arts

Faculty | Aug 11, 2017 | admin

By Julita Haber

What do professors do when students leave campus for the summer?

They take on some learning of their own.

For Gabelli School of Business professors Miguel Alzola, Julita Haber, and Kelly Ulto, this meant attending the Aspen Undergraduate Business Education Consortium at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley.

The two-day consortium, aimed at strengthening the integration of business and the liberal arts, connected faculty from about 40 U.S. colleges and universities.

Echoing both the Jesuit mission and the Gabelli School’s, the consortium focused on how business education can help students “make sense of the world and their place in it while preparing them to engage responsibly with the life of their times.”

Guest speakers Mihir Desai, Harvard professor and author of The Wisdom of Finance, and Richard Lyons, dean of the Haas School of Business, remarked on what educators can do to help this generation become productive members of society, and a presentation by Joel Podolny, a vice president of Apple and dean of Apple University, highlighted useful points about how a company stays true to its vision.

Faculty found the conference informative, thought-provoking, and well-aligned with the Fordham mission, and they are looking forward to incorporating new ideas into the Gabelli School curriculum once students are back on campus.