Head: Integrating Gonzaga’s mission into the School of Business curriculum

The Mission Mongers, or Mongers for short, are members of the business faculty and staff discovering ways to integrate the University’s mission into their everyday work. They attended conferences and studied what other universities are doing, and their passion is carrying those ideas into action.

“The conferences brought into focus what we can do, as faculty at a Jesuit institution,” said Peggy Sue Loroz, associate professor of marketing. “It’s a concept that can be readily applied in other academic disciplines, as well. Loroz, along with several other business school colleagues, attended the Business Education at Catholic Universities and the Colleagues in Jesuit Business Education conferences last summer. The BECU focuses on Catholic social thought and management education while the CJBE was founded a dozen years ago by President Robert J. Spitzer, S.J., and emphasizes the crucial juxtaposition of a Jesuit education and a business curriculum.

(Left-Right) Dr. Paul Buller, Dr. Molly Pepper, Dr. Peggy Sue Loroz, Dr. Matthew McPherson, Jane Hession

We originally had 50 new ideas for animating the mission,” said Loroz. “After voting, they were narrowed to 22 with 15 faculty members committing to work toward 14 of those proposals.”

One of the proposals involves a computer simulation model. Under faculty guidance, students would hone their money management skills through a computer simulation that allows the students to act as asset managers, basing their decisions in both the ethical and business realms. Another idea faculty members plan to develop is a collaborative effort with faculty in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. The two schools plan to market socially responsible new products.

The Mongers will also lead a discussion of adding social justice to the business school curriculum at their spring faculty retreat the week of May 11. The Mongers used ‘The Wall’ exercise to generate ideas and practices, an approach originally used by Molly Pepper, assistant professor of management, and Linda Tredennick, assistant professor of English, at the 2008 Fall Faculty Conference. The premise of ‘The Wall’ is to take individual ideas and submit them under specific themes. For the Mongers, the themes fell under the five pillars: faith/spirituality; service/service learning; justice/social responsibility; business/professional ethics; and personal identity.

An oversized map of the ideas has since been posted in the faculty work room on the second floor of Jepson so people can easily add or modify the ideas.

The idea that garnered the most votes was a visit and presentation by former Jesuit, international investment banker and well-known author Chris Lowney, who has been asked to present to the business school faculty sometime next fall. Lowney is the author of Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company that Changed the World that focuses on Jesuits and Ignatian spirituality as a model for organizational leadership.

To see the results of ‘The Wall’ exercise on campus climate that Pepper and Treddenick organized last fall, go to www.gonzaga.edu/diversity and click on “Campus Climate” on the left-hand side of the page.