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Anand should use SUSA to increase undergraduate involvement

By Chris Coraggio

On March 9, 2010

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On Friday, Feb. 19, Dean Anand presented his annual State of Smith amidst faculty, staff, students and administration. The address shared a current assessment of the Smith School and its future plans to Smith's stakeholders. The speech allowed Anand to address the school's largest members and discuss its standing as an internationally competitive business school.

The address began with a moment of silence for Robert H. Smith, who passed away in December.

Anand began with the latest updates in Smith, including the launch of the Center for Social Value Creation and the Center for Financial Policy. He also highlighted the new CEO@Smith Speaker Series, which hosted its first event last Wednesday. Anand mentioned the expansion of the Smith Executive Education programs, which, for the first time, appeared in public rankings.

An important part of Anand's speech addressed the the Smith School's current and future competition in the D.C. metropolitan area. Schools such as Johns Hopkins, the University of Virginia's Darden Business School, Duke, Cornell, St. Louis and Georgetown each seek to carve a niche in the nation's capital.

While Smith is still the best business school in the area, it must now work even harder to keep its standing.

The Smith Administration has been collecting feedback from students and faculty. The trend in the surveys pointed to one word: impact. Impact has become a Smith buzzword, but what does it mean? It means that Smith should have a lasting impact on every life it touches.

Anand made it very clear that Smith must use our strengths – most notably our intellectual capital, staff and location – to our advantage. Most notably, the school should create leaders who can solve ambiguous and complicated problems.

The undergraduate program merited considerable mention in Anand's speech. He dramatically urged increasing the engagement of undergraduates; his goal is to engage at least half of the 2,800 students in the program through research, thought leadership series, global trips, and faculty outreach.

Anand, after challenging the faculty to contemplate their decision to join academia, held that the academic profession is a "calling to transfer [our] knowledge to the next generation of leaders."

Parts of the address, however, were vague. Anand mentioned initiatives such as revising the undergraduate curriculum, but the details of this revision were unmentioned. Regardless, Anand assessed the competitive landscape realistically, especially pertaining to Smith's positioning.

For example, when the Business Week Rankings suggested that the Smith School did not focus enough on ethics, Anand launched the Center for Social Value Creation.

Unfortunately, Anand, to me, seemed detached from the issue of student engagement. He established a goal of reaching at least half of the 2,800 Smith Students, but some of his solutions, such as research opportunities and speaker series, may be impractical for a portion of the student population.

I personally believe one solution may lie in utilizing the Smith Undergraduate Student Association as a means to engage students more.

Chris Coraggio is president of the Smith Undergraduate Student Association (SUSA).