Greetings! 

I hope this Exchange finds you and your family well.

In place of Martijn’s usual note, I will end our fiscal year 2019-2020 with a new beginning, one in which Martijn invites a guest to contribute a note to the Mendoza Exchange. This first guest column will be a two-parter, with the second part coming next week. 

To begin, during the past four months, I have witnessed firsthand significant pivots across all of our internal operations. We have all heard about the dedicated faculty who shifted to online teaching with very little preparation. By many accounts, teaching online was a resounding success. This is a testament to our dedicated and creative faculty. I echo Fr. John and Tom Burish in thanking you for all that you did to serve the students during the second half of Spring/Module 4. 

I also want to highlight the significant roles that staff members have played advancing our mission throughout this pandemic. I personally have seen many “behind the scenes” activities the staff has performed in order to advance the College and I hear about many other important activities from those I work most closely with. 

Prior to serving in administration – when I was teaching and working on research full time – I did not fully appreciate the essential roles that our various staff members and staff departments play in the operations of the College. I offer my sincere appreciation for the hard work that allowed us to effectively accomplish our core mission of teaching and research despite the drastic change in day-to-day operations due to the pandemic.

Regarding research, I would like to note the critical role that it plays in establishing our reputation as thought leaders in the various disciplines represented in the College. Each year, we have faculty openings and compete in the market with the best universities in the world for top research talent. This includes recruiting senior researchers who may not have shown any prior interest in moving from their current positions, yet we try to recruit them due to what we perceive as an exceptional fit with our mission. 

Although we have five academic departments, we have many research areas. Sometimes a faculty opening in a department is general, where we try to find the “best athlete” across the areas covered by the department. At other times, we may have an opening within a department’s particular sub-discipline (e.g., digital marketing, operations research, strategy, organizational behavior). In general, many aspects of business research are motivated by practical issues while leveraging more abstract or foundational fields.

In addition to publishing in top business journals, areas where our faculty may also contribute are publication in fields such as economics, mathematics, statistics, psychology, computer science, philosophy, and others, often with the inspiration based on a business application that may be of broader interest. The span of our faculty research is indeed broad. Clearly, we could not exist without the students, but we are able to serve the students best by having thought leadership in the field. 

All of our departments invest considerable time in recruiting candidates who will make us a better institution by elevating our research and teaching. I would like to thank the faculty of each of our departments that were so heavily engaged in recruiting last year and the administrative assistants who helped plan the many campus visits. The effort was a success: we have hired 18 new regular faculty, two visiting faculty members and one postdoctoral teaching scholar to join us in the coming academic year! 

Supporting an expansive research portfolio is a goal of the College and essential to our mission. In the next Mendoza Exchange, I’ll introduce the Mendoza Research Team and the critical role they play in supporting our research.

In messages to the faculty, I often offer to help them in any way that I can. I am always open to getting together – virtually or otherwise. Let me make the same offer to the staff as well: if there is anything that I can do for you or if you want to talk about anything, such as when you think something is not as it should be or if you have ideas for improvement, please contact me. 

Best wishes for a restful and safe summer,

Ken Kelley

Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research

Edward F. Sorin Society Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations