Along the Colonnade
Fitting It All Together: New Electives for Business Administration Majors
From left: Professors Dennis Garvis, Amanda Bower and Robert Ballenger collaborated with other faculty members in and out of the Williams School to add an array of liberal arts courses to the business administration major.
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s the only top-tier liberal arts college with a nationally accredited business school, Washington and Lee has always promoted the value of studying business in the context of the liberal arts. A new revision to the business administration curriculum will make that connection even more explicit. Students can now use more than 100 liberal arts courses, from among 16 different disciplines, to help satisfy the requirements of the business administration major. “We were concerned that business majors sometimes just want to take business courses and miss the point of why they are at a liberal arts institution,” said Robert Ballenger, associate professor of business administration/information systems in the Williams School. At least three elective courses for that major have been in either accounting, economics or journalism. 8
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“The core business courses for the business major will not change, but we’ve added substantially to the elective courses from which students can choose,” continued Ballenger. “It’s designed to expand their horizons and push them out, in an organized way, into the rest of the University, so they understand that business is not a silo by itself. For instance, in business you have to be creative, be concerned about the environment and understand psychology and consumer behavior.”
COLLABORATION Amanda Bower, associate professor of business administration/marketing and a primary architect of the changes, worked with faculty across campus to identify appropriate elective courses. She collaborated with Ballenger and Dennis Garvis, department head and associate professor of business administration/
strategy, to gain faculty approval for the change. (Ballenger served as department head while Garvis was on leave.) “I started by defining what business in a liberal arts environment actually is,” said Bower. “We’ve always implicitly understood what it means, but we have never explicitly defined it.” She found no comparable integration of liberal arts courses in her examination of other colleges and universities. She defines business in a liberal arts school as the study of human behavior in a business or goal-oriented environment. “That’s really what business is all about,” she said. “You’re taking other disciplines, from statistics to biology or performance arts, and applying them in a field where you’re trying to accomplish something.” Using a Venn diagram, Bower calculated where the interests of the Williams School and liberal arts
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3/8/12 5:03 PM