The University of San Francisco is literally a school on a shining hill — on a sunny day, that is. Since the late 1970s, the school has been housed in the buildings of a former women’s college perched on a hill in central San Francisco, with 360-degree views of the city, Golden Gate Park, and the Bay.
The “Hilltop” is the grand centerpiece of USF’s 55-acre campus, with a series of buildings nestled below in a semicircle that makes up the main campus of the university and its B-school. The Graduate School of Management — which has been known since 2000 as the Masagung Graduate School of Management, bearing the name of an alumnus Indonesian businessman whose two sons, daughter-in-law and three nephews have also graduated from the school — is located a few miles east in the Folger Coffee Company Building at 101 Howard Street, in the shadow of the Bay Bridge amid a downtown that these days is beginning to finally feel recovered from the unnatural quiet imposed by the coronavirus pandemic.
Both the Folger’s Building and the Hilltop are perfect locations for a university and a B-school, placing them smack dab in the middle of a city long known as a tech and innovation haven. As the AI revolution continues to boom around them, USF’s B-school leaders have not been idle observers. The graduate school has launched a core MBA course, two electives, and a certificate course dedicated to the topic, while on the undergraduate side, courses include Societal Impact of Technology, which “aims to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the intricate relationship between technology and society, with a focus on how businesses can effectively manage the societal impact of technological advancements.” There’s a new AI Club on campus, too.
DECISIONS, DECISIONS
USF’s Michelle Millar: “Looking at all that we have to offer, do we need all of our students to take two accounting classes? We have to start having those conversations”
But here again, USF’s B-school is at a crossroads — an important inflection point on how to proceed, says Michelle Millar, associate dean of undergraduate programs.
The curricular overhaul began with a group of faculty focused on USF’s business core and reimagining, along with the restructuring, what a new business core might look like. “We started with bookends, with our beginning, Intro Business 100 course, and with our ending capstone course,” Millar says. “Then there’s all the middle.”
The Intro to Business has been shifted to more of a focus on sustainable business, she says, though the course title is still TBD. Millar and a colleague did an unofficial pilot in the fall 2023, and another colleague did an official pilot in spring 2024. “And after this semester of fall ’24, we’ll go roll it out a little bit further to about five or six sections of Business 100 each semester.”
So far, so good, she says.
“This generation of students, they just get it,” Millar says. “Incorporating sustainability throughout the course and how it impacts each major in the business world and whatnot. And they’re learning about our sustainable development goals. It’s already out there. So they’re really excited to have it. The goal is to infuse it throughout the entire curriculum, eventually getting more faculty on board with teaching it.
“On the other end of the spectrum is our capstone course. Ours right now is an entrepreneurial strategy course. And it’s good, I’m not dissing the class at all, but we wanted something more outcome-focused, which I know is another big topic of conversation around a lot of universities: How to get a job, working on a practical project, a consulting project. Or working with a partner in the community, whether it’s a nonprofit or a salesforce, all the access we have here in San Francisco. And also some project management skills built into that course, so that when they leave, they’re ready to jump into the workforce. The skills on top of all the theory.
“And now the middle is the next step.”
NERVOUS BUT HOPEFUL
That’s going to be a good one, Millar says.
Faculty are starting with what she calls the low-hanging fruit: updating course descriptions to make them more relevant. “It’s amazing how stagnant some of those things can get, even the course titles,” she says. “They’re already doing that right now.
And going back and looking at all that we offer, do we need all of our students to take two accounting classes? Really, it’s going to make a lot of people uncomfortable, but we have to start having those conversations. The faculty, most of them are excited about it.
Coming out of the pandemic, Millar is excited about the trajectory of the program and where the school is at right now.
“I think we’re still getting our footing after the pandemic, to be perfectly honest,” she says. “I mentioned to students at an event recently that this year felt a little bit more normal than prior years. And I’m hoping that momentum carries through. I’m nervous, but I’m also hopeful.
CONNECTING THE DOTS
Last October, Dean Otgo was named to a list of the “100 Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business” by the San Francisco Business Times. In talking of climate change for the newspaper article accompanying the honor, she said it is higher education’s responsibility to develop graduates prepared to contend with a world that is VUCA — volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. “Employers,” Otgo said, “are looking for graduates with high levels of climate change literacy, resiliency, adaptability, and agility. Higher education can transform the way we teach, and way we design programs so that our students are better equipped to tackle the grand challenges we face as a society. We need to emphasize skills necessary to navigate the VUCA world, and help our students to understand and approach problems from a systems perspective.”
A few months later, writing a 2024 New Year’s resolution for Poets&Quants, Otgo returned to the theme of resiliency in calling for the development of “anti-fragile” leaders. “At the University of San Francisco School of Management, we resolve to develop compassionate, adaptable, resilient, and anti-fragile future leaders, by combining the Jesuit values of cura personalis, magis, and being people for others with a forward-looking business curriculum that equips our students with the skills necessary to tackle societal grand challenges such as climate change and income inequality. As we continue to encourage and scaffold our students to embrace change, take risks, learn from failure, and challenge the status quo, we resolve to do the same ourselves.”
Seven months later — and two years into her role as dean of USF’s School of Management — Dean Otgo is pleased with the school’s progress in embracing huge, systemic change. And on the undergraduate side, in developing the leaders of tomorrow who will have to contend with the all-new problems of a rapidly changing world.
“I will say I’m both happy with our progress and also realizing more and more how difficult it is,” she says. “It’s not easy to change the paradigm. The faculty members are a self-select group, there is a reason why they chose academia and not industry. And when they grew up as students, grad students, assistant professors, tenured professors, basically all their adult life, they’ve known one structure. So for us to upend that structure and try something new, it has required a lot of courage, and it is hard, it’s very hard.
“I admit, it’s harder than I thought. But we are proud of the work we are doing. We are pushing ahead. Ultimately, if we succeed with this experiment, and find a way of settling somewhere and not revert to the status quo, I think it would be a nice example for the rest of higher ed to follow, so I’m really optimistic for that. But I’m not going to lie, it’s not easy.
“It’s painful at times. And if you look at all business schools’ core curriculum, they tend to look very similar to each other. All of them will have a course in marketing, a course in accounting, a course in finance because you’re introducing to the disciplines first, and then you go to your major. But it almost looks like a checkbox, if you will, ‘OK, I took these courses in the business core, I took these courses in my major, now I’m a business school graduate.’ But then we are not letting them intentionally connect the dots on how each of these things contribute to solving these complex problems.
“So our goal with this undergrad core revision is, how can we be more intentional, not just hope that students connect the dots at some point? We need to make sure that our curriculum is designed to connect the dots for the students, so that students can do that more easily, and they can do that from smaller scale from the beginning, and then as they progress toward junior, senior year, they can actually solve more complex problems and see perspectives from different disciplines. Otherwise, what we are doing is higher ed is, ‘OK, make them take a bunch of courses, throw them into the world, and just hope that they’ll somehow connect the dots.’”
See the next page for a Q&A with Dean Otgo and Courtney Masterson, associate dean of faculty, research and impact. It has been edited for length and clarity.
