JWU business dean seeks to boost school’s reputation

As dean of the College of Business at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, which has roughly 3,500 students, David Mitchell is working to boost the school’s reputation and bring it to the attention of both employers and prospective students.
Though at times it is overshadowed by the College of Culinary Arts, Mitchell said, the College of Business can meet the goals set for it and become a strong competitor among business schools.

PBN: What is your vision for the College of Business?
MITCHELL: The university has a strategic plan called Focus 2011, and the College of Business is of course in alignment with that. … Candidly, our brother or sister college is the College of Culinary Arts. They’re so widely well known and branded so strongly that we needed … a concrete vision, so we got together as a multi-campus College of Business strategy planning group. We modeled ourselves using some of the features and the success stories from the College of Culinary Arts – but not to replicate the College of Culinary Arts; to make our own individual self as an organization. By accepting culinary as a strong partner … and realizing they’ve done some amazing things, we took several points from that success story and we molded over the last few years our own College of Business strategic purpose.

PBN: What was that strategy?
MITCHELL: It comes down to two things, two questions to be answered. Why should a prospective student come to Johnson & Wales College of Business … when there are thousands of competitors nationally and internationally and hundreds regionally? And the flip side of that question, which is a major philosophical point here at the university, is why should an employer hire one of our graduates … when there are so many potential candidates internationally, nationally and regionally, especially when we are branded so strongly as a culinary institute? … To answer those two questions, we realized, we had to differentiate ourselves from others. And our primary differentiator is also a core value. We call it “best-fit employment.”

PBN: What is that?
MITCHELL: Best-fit employment is a match of the right student with the right program that gives the right skill sets that puts them in the right industry and finally matches them with the right employer. Best-fit employment doesn’t end the day they get their diploma; it really begins, because it’s not your first job – it’s your career. We are trying to stay focused with those graduates … for the graduates and … to strengthen the brand of the College of Business by having these great people out there doing this great work, in the right industry, for the right company, so that employers will come back and want our graduates even more. And that will answer the original question of why the student should come here.

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PBN: When did this model officially start?
MITCHELL: It’s a university initiative that started in the last five or six years. But it can’t stand alone. Another core value for the college is experiential education and community service. In both those areas, we expect them to be meaningful and authentic experiences for our students. In order for students to be ready and mature enough to have meaningful experiences, we have to have the right curriculum and the right programs. And in order to do that, we have to audit our programs on a regular basis to make sure they are current and up to date with things the industry finds relevant and the students find relevant. … The final differentiator is to tie all three things together. … So we have a branded system, called the Career Management System, that takes students from their first day in school to the day they graduate. It lets them work with academic and career coaches, so they make the right choices.

PBN: So with this in place, what are your goals as dean?
MITCHELL: We need to strengthen our relationships with strong, powerful, positive industry partners – and that does not just mean large industry; it also means with small business – and we’ve started to do that by becoming the host site for the Small Business Development Center.
The other area that needs to be strengthened is with world-class global industry partners. We have academic programs with Textron, Fidelity, Texas Instruments, Bank of America and Citizens Bank, and we want to make those partnerships deeper and better and we also want to expand our partnerships with other major world class employers.
And from an academic side, I believe the strength of our college is within the departments. We have strong faculty who have come from industry and have maintained their relationships with industry. My goal is to strengthen the departments within the college and encourage them to seek their own identities under the umbrella of our core values.

INTERVIEW: DAVID MITCHELL
POSITION: Dean, Johnson & Wales University College of Business, Providence Campus
BACKGROUND: Mitchell owned a retaurant in Massachusetts in the 1980s and worked as a consultant in Colorado before joining Johnson & Wales in 1997 as a faculty member and director of the Center of Operations Management. In 2001 he became assistant dean of the College of Business, and on July 1 he became dean. He is also the university’s liaison to the R.I. Small Business Development Center, now on JWU’s Providence Campus.
EDUCATION: B.S. in physical education, 1976, and MBA, 1978, University of Massachusetts–Amherst; Ph.D. in humanities, 2000, Salve Regina University
RESIDENCE: Middletown
AGE: 52

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