Today marks the start of my official tenure as the Martin J. Gillen Dean. I am very grateful for all your help and support (and patience!) during my service as interim dean, and look forward to continuing to work with you as the full-term dean.
I am honored to serve in this challenging role, and I am grateful for the trust being placed in me. I am fully committed to advancing Mendoza’s distinctive mission as a Catholic business school, where we seek to do top academic research and educate business leaders who contribute to human flourishing, cooperate in solidarity and compete with excellence.
I’d like to briefly reiterate the vision for the College that I presented during the recent faculty and staff meetings, namely to elevate, cooperate and integrate.
For our programs, this means to explore the following questions:
- How can we elevate our curriculum, e.g., by offering more challenging courses?
- How can we better cooperate across campus, serving all Notre Dame students?
- How can we present an integrated vision of business, integrating the business disciplines with both the humanities and analytics?
There are three areas of focus:
- Integrating coding, analytics and big data across all majors, concentrations and programs.
- Expanding experiential learning, with more opportunities for our students to participate in internships, consulting projects and service learning.
- Emphasizing business as a force for good, based on the C/catholic (universal) human values that make Mendoza distinctive.
I think that over this past year, we’ve made great progress toward this vision by introducing new undergraduate minors, opening courses to first-year business students and non-business majors, doubling the enrollment in the MBA course Business on the Frontlines and reorganizing the structure of the College’s administration to include five associate deanships, to name a few items.
You all have important roles to play in shaping the future of Mendoza. I encourage you to consider me as always available, to let me know how I can better serve you, and I look forward to your feedback and ideas.
In Notre Dame,
Martijn