In San Francisco, A Small B-School Undergoes A Big — And Impactful — Transformation

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

But here again, USF’s B-school is at a crossroads — an important inflection point on how to proceed, says Frank Fletcher, senior director of MBA programs.

“I think we’re uniquely positioned for a variety of reasons,” says Fletcher, who joined USF in 2015 and oversees its full-time MBA, working professional part-time MBA, executive MBA, Enterprise MBA, and newly offered part-time MBA online. “For location, obviously yes, we’re at the epicenter of it. It is in our backyard, we’re able to draw talent in who are at the forefront of this to meet with our students on a regular basis. And we have done that through guest lectures, through conference activities, speaker activities, so students are getting access to cutting-edge concepts around AI. And more than just generative AI, really looking at what influence AI is going to have on the world moving forward.

“So from that perspective, right now it’s manifesting itself on the co-creator side while the faculty are considering where can they leverage their areas of expertise in developing actual course content. What’s this going to look like? Thirty years ago, everyone was talking about how we can integrate the idea of global business into our curriculum. The thing is, do we do it as a major, do we do it in courses, or do we integrate it throughout the curriculum? I think we’re in those conversations right now around AI: Is it going to be standalone courses? Where do we have to discuss how it’s integrated into each course? So those conversations are taking place regularly at the committee levels, and at the faculty level — amongst faculty groups — as well.”

‘IT ALL COMES DOWN TO FLEXIBILITY & AGILITY’

USF’s Richard Stackman: “Right now I’m seeing the environment in many ways is selecting against some universities or types of universities. So it’s a time of chaos. But also opportunities”

Richard Stackman, associate dean of graduate programs since January 2021, says he’s not losing enough sleep over AI as he probably should be. “It’s become the number-one issue,” he acknowledges, and the focus of his concern is that “you just can’t all of a sudden go all-AI. And so literally over the last couple months, I’m having more discussions and we are all having more discussions about where AI can show up so that it starts to grow in multiple ways and then hopefully becomes more connected. And hopefully there are initiatives in the undergraduate program that we can learn from and hopefully they can learn from us.”

AI can, and probably will, be a big part of how programs are recast and revitalized in coming years, Stackman says. “The Master’s of Information Systems program is due for an overhaul and it’s like, ‘OK, can we teach information systems without AI?’ The answer is an emphatic no. We’re going to have to do a program redesign at the same time that we’re rethinking the program because it’s 16 months — can they shorten it to a 10-month program? How can they get the content that the students need to have along with getting here and then hopefully going out and getting jobs?”

Then there’s the newly created Master’s in Management, which has become a “base program” in the gap created by the sunsetting of three older programs. “We sunsetted three programs, which was not easy but that created opportunity, an opportunity for us to create a new program. I think I’ve referred to it as our base program because it can have multiple concentrations, a shared core, and a capstone experience.”

AI isn’t the only topic everyone is talking about. USF’s School of Management has multiple undergrad and graduate courses on the business aspects of sustainability, too, from Social Entrepreneurship on the undergrad side, which according to the course description looks at “an emerging and rapidly changing field dedicated to the starting and growing of social mission-driven ventures” to Sustainable Marketing, where students “explore how companies adopt a sustainable market orientation … that seeks to meet consumer needs and derive a competitive advantage, while addressing ecological and societal concerns.” The Master’s in Management program launching this fall will have a Sustainable Social Impact concentration. The school also offers a dual MS in Environmental Management and MBA degree.

“It all comes down to flexibility and agility,” Stackman says. “I worked in the newspaper industry to get through college and I’ve seen what the environment has done to that. And right now I’m seeing the environment in many ways is selecting against some universities or types of universities. It’s a time of chaos. But also opportunities — especially if you position yourself well so that when the pattern emerges out of chaos, you can pivot to that. And I think that’s something Otgo was looking for and just resonated with me with respect to that.”

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.

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