J. Lee Whittington, Dean, Satish & Yasmin Gupta College of Business – University of Dallas
In an interview with Invest:, J. Lee Whittington, dean of the Satish & Yasmin Gupta College of Business at the University of Dallas, discussed the school’s approach to teaching both hard and soft skills and the importance it places on character development. “We are in the launch phase of a completely new approach to graduate business education,” he said.
What have been the most important successes for the Satish & Yasmin Gupta College of Business in the past year?
We continue to create new products and find new ways to address the emerging needs of the business community in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. We “stick to our knitting” in terms of the classic book, In Search of Excellence. We have always been a practice-oriented business school with a faculty of scholar practitioners who came from industry into academia.
We are in the launch phase of a completely new approach to graduate business education. We are bringing in our Master of Leadership program in January 2025. That program will serve many people in industry, nonprofits, education, and government who need to sharpen their leadership skills.
What programs within the College of Business’s academic offering are in greatest demand?
We offer an MS in Data Analytics and plan to supplement that in 2025 with a new MS program in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. While there are many emerging trends in the hard skills area including analytical skills, business analytics, decision sciences, and artificial intelligence, we believe in teaching those hard skills without abandoning soft skills, such as interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, teamwork, and the ability to influence across boundaries.
We also bring forward the emphasis on character. We need leaders with quality character. In fact, if you don’t have character, nothing else matters. We have been long recognized for our emphasis on ethics. We have an ethics course in every degree, but we also explicitly cover ethics in every course we teach. This emphasis in character and ethics reflects who we are as individuals and as a school. It permeates everything we do – our curriculum, and our approach to business education at all levels. Our new programs focus on cultivating virtuous leaders for the real world, which means we will continue to make ethics a defining feature of our curriculum.
How is the College of Business engaging in knowledge or research transfer to support the business community?
We launched the Dallas Business Review last spring. That publication translates the rigorous research our faculty produces in the top academic journals of our field into language that businesspeople understand. For example, my colleagues published a book, titled Enhancing Employee Engagement: An Evidence-Based Approach. In that book, we offer practical insights based on rigorous research. We don’t think that rigor and relevance are mutually exclusive.
We launched the first edition of the Dallas Business Review last spring and will release another edition this summer. We plan to publish this four times a year. This is just an extension of our practice-based approach to business education. That approach informs who we hire, how we teach, and the kind of research we do. Our classes are designed to deliver “just-in-time” learning where students can immediately apply what they learned. This practice-based focus extends to our faculty members’ emphasis on doing the kind of research that makes a difference in how businesses run and how managers practice.
How is the College of Business integrating innovation and technology into its curriculum?
We now require a technology course in the MBA program – even for students who are not pursuing a technical MS Degree – so it touches every degree we offer. Moreover, everyone who comes through the University of Dallas will have to take the Gupta Core curriculum, which comprises two classes: Virtuous Leadership, which aims to cultivate character and a virtue approach to ethics, and Business and the Common Good, which aims to teach that business is a force for good in society rather than just greedy capitalism.
We also have a course called Effective Communicator where we are intentional about helping students become more effective communicators in any rhetorical setting, from pitching your boss a new idea to asking for a raise or trying to influence across boundaries where you have no authority. If people have the technical skills but lack the soft skills and the character, then they have an incomplete education. We have an ethical imperative to prepare people for the challenges of the real world and deliver a complete education. The world needs effective communicators who have quality character.
How has the educational and business communities reacted to the school’s integrated approach to business education?
When I presented that during structured interviews with corporate executives and professors at Carnegie Mellon and Texas A&M last spring, everybody affirmed the approach. They highlighted that an integrated approach means giving students the equivalent of a five-year jumpstart on their career. In absence of it, students would need to go in with a narrow, functional specialization and would not see the connections between the different areas of the business
How will being included in a top-tier national ranking for well-rounded curriculums impact the University of Dallas’s future initiatives and investments?
We are recognized as the premier Catholic liberal arts university in the United States, which we are leveraging in business school, school of ministry, and graduate liberal arts program.
In my 25 years at the University of Dallas, I have never seen the university as aligned as it currently is. The Board of Trustees is engaged and involved in what we are doing at the College of Business, including our new curriculum initiatives. Our leadership is also solidly aligned where we have a great president and deans. That level of alignment will set the stage for the University of Dallas to become even stronger.
What are the most important challenges the College of Business faces in the higher ed sector?
The challenge that all business schools face is the proliferation of business schools. There are close to 20 business schools just in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Moreover, with the online environment, there is no need to be physically here to study. That has created a hyper-competitive, red ocean market where competitors eat each other up.
The MBA degree has become a commodity. Since most MBA programs look the same, we are putting a stake in the ground and doing things differently. We will teach the same hard skills that are taught in every business school, but teach them differently by integrating them to reflect how they actually fit together in the real world. We can do this because of our scholar-practitioner faculty who bring the reality of their industrial experience and consulting into the classroom.
According to business strategy guru Michael Porter, there are basically two strategies for competing in business: One, you do the same thing everybody else does, but try to do it cheaper. Or, you do things in a way that is unique and different from everybody else. We have chosen to do things differently than everybody else, and the response has been tremendous. Our executives and corporate partners are excited about our direction in the education that we provide.
What are your top priorities for the College of Business in the next two or three years?
My top priority is raising the awareness and recognition of the University of Dallas Business School to ensure that people know we are here, and that they understand that we are different by design. We are not just a commodity. We are intentional about educating the whole person.
Moreover, as the premier Catholic liberal arts university in the United States, the faith-based identity and grounding in the classic liberal arts of the University of Dallas permeates everything we do. We will make that more explicit as we go forward into next year.
