Hopkins will establish separate schools of business and education, funded by a $50 million donation, pending approval from University trustees, Hopkins officials announced Tuesday.
The Carey Business School and the School of Education will replace the School of Professional Studies in Business and Education (SPSBE) on Jan 1. The new Business School will offer Hopkins undergraduates the option of completing a five-year combined B.A.-B.S./MBA program.
"It seeks very much to combine business training with the cross-disciplinary knowledge that a student will get elsewhere at Johns Hopkins and that is a very innovative and distinctive approach to what most business schools are doing today," Dennis O'Shea, spokesman for the University, said.
To that end, the Carey School will not accept applicants from other colleges, at least initially.
"The focus is on providing an opportunity for undergraduates," Pamela Cranston, who will become interim dean of the Carey Business School until a national search for a new dean, which is expected to take six to 12 months, can be completed, said.
"In the short term, the goal for the Business School is to develop full-time programs for the undergraduates," she added. Opening it up to other applicants in the future is also a possibility.
The stated reasoning behind this move is to create business leaders who are not merely "generic" by combining business education with interdisciplinary studies at Homewood.
"Most business schools produce business leaders, for lack of a better term, in a vacuum," Cranston said. "The focus of the Hopkins Business School will be to take business but apply it to the field that you're actually interested in, and link the two of them together c9 You're not going to end up being your all-purpose jack-of-all-trades business manager."
According to Cranston, it was important to create dedicated programs because SPSBE caused confusion and made it difficult to attract top faculty.
"You can imagine how faculty and deans might think twice about being in a school called the School of Professional Studies," she said. "It may provide an opportunity to recruit and retain senior leadership for both the Education School and the Business School because they're part of their own discipline, instead of their own hybrid model."
Ralph Fessler will be dean of the new School of Education. He has served as dean of SPSBE since 2000. The School of Education, although operating under a variety of names over the years, has an even longer history than the School of Business. It has been around since 1901, according to Fessler, while a program in business education didn't emerge until 1916.
"The school we're evolving from has played a very important role in the history of Johns Hopkins and in many ways it served as an incubator for many parts of the University, [but] this is really positive across the board. It's a maturing of those two areas in education and business to a point in which they're ready to mature as their own schools."
Having two separate programs instead of one will help recruit students, Fessler said.
"I think the fact that they were not in schools that held the title of their disciplines was a constraining factor," he said. "Take the business side, for example. Not being a stand-alone business school certainly did not help [in] recruiting students c9 didn't help in creating an identity for a business school that the Carey School would have. I think the same is true for education."
However, the combined program comes too late for many current Hopkins undergraduates.
"We don't know exactly how soon we're going to get it off the ground," she said. "It's obviously going to be late for this year's seniors. Our hope would be that at the very least we'd be able to get something up and running that the current Sophomore class could enter."
Admission will also be highly selective, at least at first, with the initial group of students accepted numbering no more than 30, and expanding to about 50 students a year once the program gets off the ground, according to Cranston.
"Initially, the focus is on providing an opportunity for Hopkins undergraduates," she said.
"Hopkins is noted for innovation, for excellence, for applying the knowledge that's developed here to real problems in the world, and I would expect that from the Carey Business School," she added.
The Carey Business School is named in honor of the great-great-grandfather of trustee emeritus William Polk Carey, whose W. P. Carey Foundation will pay for half of the Business School's $100 million funding plan. The other $50 million will come from other donors, according to administrators.
Carey previously established the W. P. Carey Business School at Arizona State University in 2003, and had given $2 million to the W. P. Carey Entrepreneurship and Management program in the School of Engineering at Hopkins. Students wishing to take part in the five-year combined program will likely have to take classes in the entrepreneurship program, according to Cranston.
--Staff writer Sammy Rose Saltzman also contributed to this report.
