BY JIM DOTI / CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT article published in the Orange County Register on Sept. 27, 2015
I had an opportunity at this year’s annual Freedom Fest conference in Las Vegas to speak on how economic theory can be used to help move a university forward. This was a labor of love for me, since I bemoan that fact that most people think the science of economics has no real practical value. People apparently believe that anyone who can get through the mental gymnastics of supply and demand and production functions have proven their analytical reasoning ability. But any practical value? Forget it.
That’s why I relished explaining how something as obtuse as “Tobin’s Law” created the financial rationale at Chapman for developing our new Rinker Health Science Campus in the Irvine Spectrum. And relating how the concept of “economies of scale” gave us strong theoretical justification for our strategy of moving Chapman forward from a small college to a medium-sized university. Even Milton Friedman’s “variable lag” concept from his critique of Federal Reserve policy led us to focus on student selectivity as a lead strategy in improving Chapman’s rankings in U.S. News & World Report. There are other economic concepts I presented in my talk, like “sunk costs” and “incentives,” but the one to which I devoted most attention was that of “comparative advantage.”
David Ricardo was the economist in the early 19th century who introduced the concept of comparative advantage. He used it to explain how two nations can benefit from trade even though one nation may be able to produce all of its goods and services at a lower cost than the other nation.
In the context of Chapman University, comparative advantage can be used to explain why we decided in the 1990s to pour whatever strategic resources we had at the time into expanding our fledgling film program. Because of our proximity to Hollywood and its talent base from which we could draw, we figured that our comparative advantage relating to location would give us a leg-up in building a truly stellar film program. The fact that we had a dean and faculty with an exciting vision of going digital and a curriculum centered on storytelling gave us even more of a comparative advantage vis-à-vis the competition.
At our Fall Faculty Retreat a few weeks ago, I challenged the faculty of each of our schools and colleges to think about their comparative advantage. I asked them to consider how identifying their comparative advantage will help them build truly exemplary academic programs that make the Chapman learning environment an even more exciting and vibrant place to be.
Actually, my challenge to the faculty shouldn’t be all that intimidating, for we’ve already made good headway on it.
Dean Patrick Fuery and the faculty of our Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, for example, are moving forward with a vision of “creative industries.” This is an interdisciplinary curriculum and research model based on creativity, student collaboration and more active engagement with the wider Southern California community.
In our Fowler School of Law, Dean Tom Campbell provided great leadership in establishing a curricular model for developing “practice-ready” law school graduates. What’s unique about this approach is how the curriculum has been modified to include coursework directly related to the business side of the law.
While it’s very early in his tenure, Dean Giulio Ongaro of our College of Performing Arts is enthusiastic about the possibility of developing a new interdisciplinary outreach. This would involve giving our incredibly talented students in dance, theatre and music the opportunity to be “practice-ready,” like our law students, in understanding the business and entrepreneurial side of the arts. Obviously, Dean Ongaro is also excited about working with Dean Bill Hall of our soon-to-be-completed Musco Center for the Arts to fully integrate one of the leading performing arts center in higher education into the performance protocol of our students.
With construction soon to start on the largest and most expensive building on the Chapman campus, our new Center for Science and Technology, I’m excited about the vision of Dean Andrew Lyon and the faculty of the Schmid College. That vision involves creating a student-centered ecosystem of learning. That’s an academic model that immerses our Schmid College students in a diverse, interdisciplinary and high-intensity set of programs that will serve, as Dean Lyon enthusiastically describes it, “as a launch pad to the future.” What makes all this particularly timely is that we have designed our new Center for Science and Technology to support and sustain that new vision.
Dean Reggie Gilyard and his faculty in the Argyros School of Business and Economics are looking at a new curricular and research trust in “big data.” This will complement the work of Dr. Essie Adibi in the Anderson Center for Economic Research as well as that of our resident Nobel Laureate, Vernon Smith, and his team in our Economic Science Institute.
That’s not all! Dean Janeen Hill of our Crean College of Health and Behavioral Sciences and Dean Ron Jordan of the first nationally accredited pharmacy program in Orange County see the creation of collaborative teams as a bold step in Chapman’s new thrust in the graduate health sciences. These collaborative teams at our Rinker Campus will include physical therapists, pharmacists, physician assistants and specialists in health communication as well as communicative disorders.
Finally, the newly appointed dean in our highly vaunted College of Educational Studies, Dean Margaret Grogan, will, I’m sure, build on the visionary work of our departing dean, Don Cardinal, who positioned the college to be an agent of change through our K-12 integrated studies program and our highly regarded doctoral programs. Cardinal, I’m pleased to announce, will now take on the leadership of our Center for Research on Ability and Disability.
All of these new visionary trusts will build on the comparative advantage that distinguishes Chapman as a leader in higher education.