CBA Dean Joseph Eisenhauer

Dear Friends,

This fall, there is a new excitement around campus!  We have welcomed our new President, Dr. Antoine Garibaldi, whose experience and leadership are already being felt at UDM.  The University has broken ground for a new fitness center, the first freestanding building on the McNichols Campus in decades, and renovations to existing buildings are underway at both McNichols and the law school on the Riverfront Campus.

The College of Business Administration is energized as well. In recent months, we have strengthened our faculty and staff by hiring an excellent new assistant dean for Academic Affairs and outstanding new faculty in Accounting and Decision Sciences. Each of these hires resulted from a national search involving top-quality candidates from around the country. We’ve also recruited a larger and stronger freshman class, whose average ACT score of 24.5 is up from 23.4 last year, and far exceeds the average of 20 for the State of Michigan and the national average of 21.1.  Indeed, 30 percent of our incoming class scored in the top 10 percent of high school students in the US. And we’ve launched a national advertising and recruiting strategy to alert potential students outside of Michigan to the tremendous educational opportunities available at UDM’s College of Business Administration. This includes advertisements in America magazine and other venues, attendance at college fairs in selected cities around the country, and the development of stronger links with Mercy and Jesuit high schools nationwide.  As always, one of the greatest selling points we have in recruiting students is the success of our alumni. Elsewhere in this newsletter and on our website, you can read about our 2011 Hall of Honor inductees—a truly remarkable group of professional and civic leaders, all of whom were educated in the College of Business Administration.

In keeping with our unique mission, our faculty has recently initiated service-learning projects in graduate and undergraduate Finance courses, in which UDM students provide financial literacy to Detroit-area public school students. Our goal is to incorporate service-learning into each of our business disciplines by the end of next year, and we are now accepting contributions to endow the Rev. Gerald Cavanagh, S.J. Scholarship, which will be awarded annually to the student engaged in the most meaningful service learning experiences.

At the same time, our faculty continues to publish leading-edge research on topics of vital interest to modern businesses, such as investment in ecologically sustainable industries. Indeed, our commitment to incorporating social responsibility and sustainability into both our research and coursework recently earned us a ranking among the top 100 MBA programs in the world for social and environmental stewardship by the Aspen Institute, an internationally recognized nonprofit organization. While we are extremely proud to have achieved this recognition, we are not complacent.  Having embraced the concept of continuous improvement, we will keep building upon our accomplishments and strengthening the education we offer, so that our current and future students will be as prepared as their predecessors for productive, rewarding lives and careers that make a difference in the world.

All the best,

Joe Eisenhauer
Dean, College of Business Administration