Experiences of Successful Center Directors - Baylor University

STATISTICS ABOUT CENTER/PROGRAM
Year Started
The Center for Entrepreneurial Studies was established in 1979 by the Babson
Student Chamber of Commerce. It coincided, somewhat, with the establishment
of the Academy of Distinguished Entrepreneurs and the Founder’s Day celebration.
Our very first entrepreneurship course was a graduate course, and it was
offered in 1967. We offered our first undergraduate major in 1979.
However, the very first thing we did in entrepreneurship was in 1959, when the
Babson Alumni Association Student Business Initiative Award was donated by
the first graduating class, the class of 1920. There has always been a strong
entrepreneurial theme running through the school, and that’s important.
Faculty and Staff
Funding
The full-time faculty who teach nothing but entrepreneurship numbers eight. We
have four full-time faculty who teach some entrepreneurship. We have four
adjunct faculty who teach at least one course each semester, and we have Paul
Reynolds, who is in the Babson Chair, which is primarily a research chair. We
always have someone in that chair. We have six staff, and that is about the
equivalent of five full-time staff. Some of them run an 8- or 9-month year, so I
think that is about five.
Endowments
We built the whole program with only one endowed chair. In terms of what we
had to get CES started, all we had was just that one endowed chair. That was the
Paul T. Babson Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies, which was endowed in 1980. I
believe that it was the first endowed entrepreneurial professorship in the United
States. Then we raised the small amounts for the business plan competition and
so on; but the next significant amount we raised was for Price-Babson.
Price-Babson is operating money that comes in every year. The Price Foundation
said they liked what we had done so much and what Jeff Timmons had done that
they put up a Price Challenge. They put up a half million dollars and said you’ve
got to match it two for one to make it $1.5 million. If you do that in two years, then
the money is yours. By the time we did...they never told us they put the money into
an escrow account, and they paid us the interest as well. So, we got like a $1.67 or
$1.7 million endowment, which is not for a chair. It’s just for operating funds.
We have raised about $9 million in the last couple of years. So the total amount
of money is probably somewhere in the region of $12 million to $14 million.
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