Experiences of Successful Center Directors - Baylor University

Endowment Campaigns
So if someone wants to start an entrepreneurship program, if they were to sit down
and try to put this together and endow a center or a chair, I’d certainly recommend
going to mega-chairs—if someone really had that kind of money and wanted to put
up—because then you’ve got... take 5% of $3 million and put $150 thousand, of
course that doesn’t pay everything, but you could pay some of the salary and give
some meaningful operating money to the person doing research, developing
courses, developing outreach programs and so on. So I’d recommend that. I’d
definitely want to put in the bricks and mortar.
Having said that, we just raised money for a building, which will be the first time we’ve
had our own separate building. It will be very integrated with other academic buildings. It
is not going to be a freestanding one up on the hill. It’s going to be very much integrated
so we don’t get the sense that we are becoming isolated. But I wouldn’t put money into
the buildings because that’s what the deans are trying to do. They’ll take the bloody
money and corrupt it into what they think it is. And we have to fight that battle at Babson,
too, by the way, in terms of: “Well, it’s our money but why should we be charging off a
teaching position to it when you don’t expect marketing to do that?” And we want to be
good citizens so we understand there’s always that give and take in that process, but I
fight very hard to make sure if I have a benefactor that it really is going to be for entrepreneurship
and not get corrupted into a finance chair or accounting chair, which people say,
“Well, it’s kind of entrepreneurship, but it really isn’t.” And that would be very important.
GROWTH AND MAINTENANCE ISSUES
Luckily, at Babson we’ve got an excellent turnover of faculty. But you worry because
you try to recruit people on tenure track. We’ve got several on tenure track,
and there’s been an excellent turnover of people, which has allowed us to bring in
new people. There are other departments at Babson where there are a lot of older,
tenured people who’ve been around a long time. I’ve never done any research on
it, but my notion is that you can find almost a direct correlation between the longevity
of the senior and the lack of innovation in the programs. Not because they want
it that way but because they just can’t keep bringing in enough young faculty. So
that’s the challenge I keep in mind—lots of new ideas flowing through.
We are going to have a Ph.D. program now as well, and that will serve to attract
people. We are doing it through visiting scholars. We provide office space, fax,
computers, and so on. We can’t provide any living expenses, but we can treat them
like a visiting faculty member. So far we’ve had no trouble with people wanting to
come to Babson and spend a semester a year with us to learn what we do. But they
also contribute some intellectual things at the same time such as research and
writing. It’s an important issue. Obsess with quality. No matter how obsessed you
are, you’ll still get an occasional disappointment, whether it’s a faculty member or a
course.
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