In His Final Year As President, Babson’s Stephen Spinelli Is Grading Himself First

Stephen Spinelli Jr. is not, by his own admission, going anywhere quietly.

With roughly a year left before he hands off Babson College to a successor, the school’s 14th president – in the role since 2019, and set to close out an eight-year tenure at the end of June 2027 – is spending his final stretch in office compiling what he calls a retrospective. The document is built on three pillars: the original strategic plan he set when he arrived, the emergency pivot the college made during Covid-19, and what Babson internally dubbed the “greatness agenda.”

The goal isn’t a farewell tour. It’s a diagnostic.

“This becomes really the de facto strategy of the college,” Spinelli tells Poets&Quants in a recent interview in his office atop Horn Library on Babson’s Wellesley campus. “What were the successes? Where were the failures? Where were the opportunities, the weaknesses?”

A DISCIPLINE BUILT ON ‘CRITICAL FEW’

Spinelli is preparing the diagnostic for the Babson Board of Trustees to use however it sees fit – including, he expects, as a set of questions for whomever succeeds him. “So let’s take a look at this,” he says, describing the pitch he imagines making to candidates for the top job. “Does it make any sense to you? What do you think? Are we going into the right direction? Where would you take us?” His approach to institutional strategy runs on a number: never fewer than three priorities in a given year, never more than nine, with five as the general sweet spot.

He calls them “critical few objectives” – a term that replaced an earlier, more sprawling version of the exercise that once produced what he estimates were 42,000 possible goals. Unworkable, and by his own logic, close to guaranteed to fail.

“What is a critical objective? It’s an interesting discussion with a management team,” he says. “Why is that critical? Do you think that’s critical? And you have to come to some agreement.”

THE MASTER’S THAT ASKS STUDENTS TO SKIP THE HYPOTHETICAL

One of this year’s critical objectives: rethink Babson’s graduate delivery systems and how they line up against the market, work that fed directly into the college’s newest degree. Babson’s Master of Science in Management in Business Creation lets students graduate with a built and validated venture rather than a case-study version of one. Spinelli describes the timing as almost overdue – a convergence of the college’s entrepreneurship expertise, growing market demand for flexible graduate delivery, and the arrival of AI tools that make individualized, venture-based coursework possible at scale.

“For me it’s an answer to a prayer,” he says. “This is almost a required degree for us to have. Took us too long.”

He says the college was slow to move into online delivery because professors wanted to get the format right rather than ship something diminished. “It took a year longer than it should, maybe two,” he says. “But they poured themselves into it.”

The program is fully online and part-time, aimed at working professionals, with in-person options layered in. Spinelli is already thinking about how loosely to define “part-time” itself – whether a single course should connect a learner to ancillary programming even if they never enroll in a second class. It’s part of a broader vocabulary shift he’s pushing at Babson: replacing “student” with “learner,” a term he thinks better fits people returning to campus mid-career.

ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP’S NEXT ELEVATION

Asked which piece of Babson founder Roger Babson’s original vision – practical, ethical, entrepreneurial – matters most today, Spinelli declines to rank vital organs. Instead, he points to where the college’s strategic language is headed next: from entrepreneurial leadership, the frame it has used for seven years, toward what he calls values-based entrepreneurial leadership.

The idea, as he lays it out, isn’t about imposing a single set of values on the community. It’s about building the capacity to state your own values clearly enough that people can debate them productively. He points to a values-based classroom discussion the college convened around the Israeli-Arab conflict as an early test case – students were told they could say anything, provided it was respectful, and the exercise held.

“You’re allowed to say that,” he says of a hypothetical hard line delivered inside the rules. “But if you say, ‘Listen, you old bastard … ‘ you’re out of here – we can’t accomplish anything.”

He invokes Ray Kroc’s line about business – “When you’re green, you’re growing. When you’re ripe, you rot” – as the underlying logic. Even a No. 2 nationally ranked college, he argues, has to keep asking what it’s doing to grow.

AI, RUN THROUGH 2 SEPARATE PIPES

Spinelli splits Babson’s AI strategy into two distinct tracks. Running the college with AI, he says flatly, is “relatively mundane” – a streamlining exercise aimed at trimming costs and improving efficiency at a moment when the economics of higher education are under real strain. Teaching students to use AI is the more consequential half, and it starts with Roger, the AI-driven entrepreneurship tool Babson built and named after its founder.

Spinelli has also built something more personal: a chatbot trained on his own decades of interviews and public remarks, which he uses to interrogate his own thinking – and catch contradictions across time. “Is it a contradiction? Is it a mistake? Is it an evolution?” he says. “In fact it forces you to be slightly more human.”

The exercise has him weighing a return to teaching after he steps down – though on his own terms. He’s floating the idea of a single franchising course designed to scale to as many as a thousand learners, built with the help of a “franchise bot” currently in development. If he can’t make the class work at real scale, he says, he probably won’t do it at all.

WHAT HE INHERITED FROM A MAN WHO GOT OFF AT THE LAST STOP

Spinelli’s affection for Babson’s origin story is unmistakable. He recounts how founder Roger Babson bought a train ticket to the last stop out of Boston sometime around 1919, walked until he found open land, and decided on the spot that the place was right for a college – eventually acquiring the 338 acres that became the Wellesley campus.

Babson’s other legacy is stranger, and Spinelli clearly delights in it: a fascination with Isaac Newton that shaped his own investing theory – what goes up must come down, rendered as a stock-picking method that made Babson wealthy enough to buy Newton memorabilia. That includes the English philosopher’s physical library, shipped across the Atlantic and rebuilt inside a conference room on campus, and a graft from a Newton family apple tree that still produces fruit on Babson’s small orchard today. Spinelli makes an apple pie from it every fall and invites student government to share it.

“His eccentricity was always followed by action,” Spinelli says. “He did something about it.”

THE RANKING HE SAYS HE DOESN’T CARE ABOUT

Babson has placed second nationally behind Princeton in the Wall Street Journal‘s college rankings for two consecutive years. Asked what stands between Babson and the top spot, Spinelli doesn’t hesitate: endowment. He estimates Princeton’s is roughly 30 times the size of Babson’s, a gap he says shows up directly in per-student resources.

He is candid about wanting to close the gap anyway. “I do care about the rankings,” he says. “It is the marketing lift that gave Babson unbelievable traction, applications through the roof.”

The recent U.S. News entrepreneurship ranking stung differently. That ranking measures Babson’s MBA concentration in entrepreneurship, not the standalone entrepreneurship master’s degree the college has since carved out as its own credential – a gap Spinelli argues understates what the college actually does now. Babson’s program, which U.S. News had ranked No. 1 in entrepreneurship for 32 consecutive years before dropping the school to No. 2 in 2026, remains untouched by the same measurement problem – a streak Spinelli says no other school has matched in any specialization ranking.

WHAT HE WANTS TO STILL BE TRUE

Closing out the extraordinary interview, Spinelli returns, unprompted, to a line from his own July Fourth op-ed for Poets&Quants: that America’s harder test isn’t generating opportunity, but turning it into value that endures. Asked what that test means applied to his own presidency, he doesn’t point to a building or a program.

“I hope what endures is a willingness to evolve what is here,” he says, “to understand the history, to build on the history, but be willing to evolve and change and make mistakes.” He goes further, arguing that entrepreneurial leadership itself – the framework that has defined his tenure – should eventually be displaced by a better idea, and that Babson has an obligation to be the one that displaces it.

Progress, he adds, rarely moves in a straight line anyway. “It’s two steps forward, one step back, maybe,” he says. “So let’s keep walking.”

DON’T MISS HE BUILT BABSON INTO A PREMIER ENTREPRENEURSHIP SCHOOL. NOW STEPHEN SPINELLI IS RETIRING and HOW U.S. NEWS RANKS BUSINESS SCHOOLS BY MBA SPECIALIZATION IN 2026

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