A growing program promises to deliver the same quality, no matter what the name.
On May 10, university Senate approved establishing the Department of Management and Organizational Studies – now housing the Aubrey Dan Program in Management – within the Faculty of Social Science.
The new department will launch July 1. In recent years, the Dan Program has evolved greatly, growing in size now housing 23 faculty members and 2,700 students, said Brian Timney, Social Science dean.
He added the program offers its own courses and does its own hiring and promotion. It basically operates as a standalone department under the Collective Agreement, Timney explained.
“Creating a department just makes (the Dan Program) one more department in Social Science,” he said. “That was the motion but (in Senate) the subtext was that in some way, having a department legitimizes it even more and causes more brand confusion. I don’t see that.”
Referring to comments made by Ivey Business School Dean Carol Stephenson and others, Timney echoed concerns he doesn’t believe are justified, noting the overarching concern seems to be one over having two businesses-oriented programs within one institution.
Stephenson, who opposed the motion, said if the department were to be approved, there would be potential for confusion, with Western offering two distinct businesses programs.
Raising concerns over changes in program enrollment that may result from this confusion and potentially affect enrollment-driven budgets, Ivey professor Robert Klassen backed Stephenson’s concerns in Senate, as did Nick Dyer-Witheford, acting dean of the Faculty of Information & Media Studies, who called the establishment of the department a “pressing concern.”
But the new Department of Management and Organizational Studies won’t generate such anticipated issues, Timney said.
“The anxiety is fairly limited. I really don’t think there’s any confusion in most people’s minds between Ivey and the Dan program. The (program’s) plan saw it as one that was business-oriented, but rooted in Social Science. The theme was to be evidence-based management,” he said.
“The target markets, in terms of students, were those students who wanted a grounding in business education, who could then go on into low-level management positions in various organizations. That’s quite different from the career aspirations of many Ivey students whose preferred route is to go into finance, investment banking or consulting.”
Timney added the Dan Program, even before the department’s formation, had established five distinct streams: accounting; finance; consumer behaviour – like marketing, but based in consumer psychology; human resource management; and commercial aviation management.
“The program itself is quite distinct in terms of content and the kinds of students we have, and their career paths,” he said.
One concern arising not just out of the department’s creation, Timney continued, is the teaching of subjects like strategic management and accounting in two business-oriented programs will generate some overlap, and that’s bound to happen, he noted.
And it’s not like graduates of the Dan Program will be passing themselves off as Ivey grads, Timney said.
“The concern that students are masquerading as Ivey students as an underlying worry is one that doesn’t bear scrutiny. All of our experience with this is students are very proud of this program. It implies that the (Dan) Program is an inferior program and we would say that it isn’t. And the stronger the Dan Program is, the less worry Ivey should have,” he continued.
“The demand for (Ivey’s) HBA program is still enormous; there’s no shortage of demand and it’s become a destination program for students. There are two kinds of students in our program – those who come in and want to go to Ivey and those who go through the Dan Program. There are more students who want to get into Ivey and who want to get into the Dan Program than either of us can sustain.”
Timney stressed there will be no confusion resulting from the creation of the Department of Management and Organizational Studies – Dan graduates are proud of their program and will promote the Dan brand, while Ivey graduates will continue to do the same.
“We do not see ourselves as being in competition – we see the Dan program as something that’s unique. We’ve constructed the program as such in that they, (as Social Science students), can’t specialize in business and ignore those things we think are important.”