New faculty hires
One of the most important things we continue to do is hire new faculty. We have a lot of retiring faculty who have committed their entire careers to CSUDH, so now we need to try to fill their shoes. Right now, we have six new positions open for next fall in disciplines across the college from management to political science to finance and accounting. That’s on top of seven new great faculty members we brought on this year who are already bringing new ideas into their departments.
Especially in business, recruiting for top faculty is tough – a lot of people with Ph.D.s can go into the marketplace and work for businesses instead of becoming professors. That means it’s very competitive to get great faculty. But so far, we have been able to do so, and we have a number of candidates who look very promising for this round as well.

AACSB accreditation
We’ve talked a lot about AACSB accreditation and will continue to do so because we’ve just completed our last year of a five-year candidacy and are now moving into the self-study phase of the process to become accredited. AACSB is the preeminent accrediting body for business schools in the world. We’ll write a self-study report starting in the fall to be submitted in August 2007 and then have our final visitation from our AACSB advising deans – a group of three deans from other universities around the country – in 2008. AACSB has been very impressed with our progress and also given us feedback of areas where we need to focus on such as our faculty’s publishing output, which we are improving with some of the new hires this year who came in with impressive publishing backgrounds. This semester, we are preparing to write that hefty self-study report next year.

Business advisory board
One of the things AACSB has been most impressed with about the business program is our Business Advisory Board. This has been one of my most pressing priorities since I’ve been dean. When I came on, we had six members. Now, we’re up to 34 and these people are some of the major players in the area’s business community. For example, Ernie Klinger, who’s the executive vice president of business development and CFO of It’s a Grind, a chain of coffee houses with franchises in 11 states, just agreed to become the chair of our advisory board’s executive committee. Some of the other new members that have joined recently include Michael DiBernardo, an alum who’s the director of planning and research for the Port of Los Angeles, Gus Siekierka, vice president of human resources for Computer Sciences Corporation, and J. Rae Walker, president of Axiom Medical.
          We meet four times a year, which is a lot for a board like this, to further connect the business community to the college. They provide incredibly valuable feedback and ideas for our programs and projects. Looking ahead, we’ve discussed expanding the board to include all of CBAPP’s departments, not just business disciplines.  In fact, I just heard from the Department of Public Administration and they want to be included in the advisory board.  So now we have the challenge of finding public and criminal justice administration oriented advisory board members.  We are always looking for more and more prominent members to lead and advocate for the college in the community. They’ve volunteered a lot of their personal time for our benefit. For example, board members have met with faculty candidates for breakfast interviews. Some of our new hires this year were impressed with that because it showed that connection between the principles we teach and the practitioners out in the community who use them. We appreciate all that the board members provide to the College.

New programs
We started a new criminal justice major this fall, which was formerly a concentration, and we’d like to follow up on that success with other new programs soon. We’ve always got a variety of programs in the pipeline. Right now, we’re looking to hire a new faculty member to get a sports entertainment and hospitality management program off the ground, which would use the proximity of the Home Depot Center to really get students hands-on experience. We’re looking to bring new concentrations within the MBA program such as human resource management and information systems. We’re also working on a logistics and supply chain management program that would capitalize on our proximity to the ports. Believe me, this isn’t everything, but it’s a sampling of what’s to come. 

Major funding received
That global logistics and supply chain management program I just spoke of got a major boost with a two-year grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture this past year for $250,000. That’s by far the biggest grant the college has ever received. And we just secured an earmark with the help of Congresswoman Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-37^th District) worth $500,000 to develop a program on entrepreneurship, small business development, and global logistics.
          Both allocations have specific ways in which they will help build these new programs, but we hope their common thread is a glimpse of even larger external contributions coming into the college. No doubt about it, we’d like to raise more money to help us maintain the programs we have and add to that because the climate of public education across the map is changing. Regional state universities like ours are having to find external funding more and more because both the federal and state governments are cutting back on their education funding.

Successes of ‘05
Regardless of the funding climate, there are always people doing great things within CBAPP. This past year, we saw Larry Press, professor of computer information systems, help the campus dorms go wireless, a project he worked tirelessly on with university administration that originated as a student project in one of his classes. Gus Martin, the former chair of the public administration, was promoted to acting assistant vice president of faculty affairs for the entire campus. Taking his place as public administration chair is Iris Baxter, a real CSUDH success story who started her college education at CSUDH and now teaches and leads new students on campus.

          We’ve seen great success stories from students as well. Our chapter of Pi Alpha Alpha, a national public administration honors society, received the Chapter Award of Excellence, which is given to only one campus chapter in the entire country. We also had a Millennium Momentum Foundation Scholarship winner in Gloria Harper. She’s the second CBAPP student in as many years to receive the scholarship. And we had all of the new business leaders join our Business Advisory Board. No doubt, we’ll have a whole slew of new success stories to talk about at the end of 2006, but for now, I’ve got to get back to work because going through all these priorities for the college makes me realize how much work we all have.