The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting entrepreneurship in America, named Dean of the College William Scott Green to its newly-formed Panel on Entrepreneurship Curriculum in Higher Education this month.
“Entrepreneurship draws from and applies to all disciplines,” Green said.
For the last year, Green has been teaching a 200-level course at UR on the nature of entrepreneurship. This semester, former President Thomas Jackson joins Green in the classroom.
The Nature of Entrepreneurship course was made possible by a grant totalling $3.5 million from the Kauffman Foundation in December of 2003. This came to UR after a six-month competition between 15 schools to earn the final prize. In total, eight universities across the country received multi-million dollar grants.
“These Kauffman Campus schools will create a culture of entrepreneurship, empowering all students on campus to access the skills, orientation and networks that can lead to greater opportunities for them,” Kauffman Foundation President and CEO Carl Schramm said.
Green will join the dean of the Columbia University business school, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Library, the dean of the faculty at Duke University and others as he takes his place on the Panel, which is currently chaired by Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California-Berkeley Richard Newton.
According to the Kauffman Foundation, the Panel will meet throughout the year for work and review sessions. “The Kauffman Panel’s charter will be to review practices and develop a well-articulated common set of principles and skills that can be taught,” Schramm said.
The need for the Panel arose after the grants were given to universities two years ago. With them, the schools were to develop curricula appropriate to be taught at an undergraduate level, and then the schools were to implement their plans. Not all plans were alike, however, and the Kauffman Foundation now feels the need to bring unification to the curricula.
“Though most university-level entrepreneurship programs have some basic features in common, there is so much variation it’s hard to identify a typical curriculum, let alone an exemplary one,” Kauffman Foundation Vice-President of Entrepreneurship Judith Cone said.
The Panel indicated that its report will be published in 2007.
UR’s current entrepreneurship curriculum includes the Nature of Entrepreneurship course, in addition to courses taught at the Eastman School of Music, the Margaret Warner School of Education and Human Development and the Simon School of Business. Other opportunities are also available to students through the UR Center for Entrepreneurship, directed by Green.
Over the next five years, UR intends to take the Kauffman Foundation’s $3.5 million grant and add matching funds totaling $7 million. These funds will be used to infuse entrepreneurship into education at every level and in every discipline offered at UR.
“Great entrepreneurs are laced into the history of our university,” Jackson said. “That entrepreneurial spirit continues strongly today on campus.”
Majarian can be reached at mmajarian@campustimes.org
