INTERVIEW: Top of the Class
Tim Haight, dean of Cal State L.A.’s business school, is bringing the campus national recognition
By ANTHONY PALAZZO
Staff Reporter
Tim Haight isn’t a typical academic. Throughout a 30-year career, he’s managed to find time for the real world, building a track record as a turnaround expert advising and at times running financially troubled companies. In 1990, he took over a Maryland consulting firm, restoring it to profitability in one year.
As dean of Cal State L.A.’s College of Business and Economics since 1998, Haight has infused the school with the same entrepreneurial energy. He’s forged partnerships with major companies, including PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay division and Oracle Corp., which donated $11 million in business applications software. Scholarship donations brought by the school’s Retailer of the Year event have doubled since 1999.
The business school attracted nationwide recognition by making U.S. News & World Report’s annual list of top undergraduate programs for the last three years, the only such program at a Los Angeles-based public university to make the list.
Question: Why does Southern California need to have a business school like yours?
Answer: Frankly, I think we have the most important role of any university in Southern California. We draw from a population that has a large number of immigrants, and we’re probably one of the most diverse institutions in the country. It’s important for students, regardless of their economic circumstances, to have access to the best education possible. It seems to me that if Southern California is going to prosper, we need to make sure that access to the business world, access to jobs, is for each and everyone.
Q: How is Cal State L.A. different from the other Cal States?
A: People tend to lump them together, and there are some similarities. Most of the students attend from the surrounding areas. We all seem to work with people who are maybe first generation that are putting themselves through school. We have a different mix of ethnicity, but the common thread is these students tend to work part time. Many of them can’t afford to go to school full time.
Q: What do you see as your mission?
A: Cal State has to be an applied business program. Our mission is mainly working with students and teaching. Research is important to us if it keeps us current and allows us to provide cutting edge information. You have to have them both, but we need to be student focused.
Q: What’s the dean’s role in all this?
A: One thing is to come up with a vision for the business school: look at our strengths and weaknesses and those of our competitors. What I thought would be hardest was getting our faculty to follow, but this particular faculty not only rallied, they have a passion for the students like none I’ve ever seen. If you talk to other deans all across the country the hardest thing they have to do is get faculty to embrace a new direction.
Q: You managed to nab an $11 million donation of business applications software from Oracle. Why did you pursue Oracle?
A: Most of the schools that I had talked to were going with SAP software, and I thought Oracle would win out, because they were moving in the direction of the Internet. Besides, SAP already had over 75 universities signed up, but Oracle didn’t have a partnership program in place. I thought that Oracle needed to have graduates that know how to run their system. It was a gamble, but I thought it made sense.
Q: Does a software system really have that great an impact on a school?
A: Years ago, you would look at a business school as you would a shopping center. There has to be an anchor tenant. If I majored in finance, I would have very little interaction with the other areas accounting, economics. Now we’ve turned it sideways and said the anchor tenant is technology. Basically what we’re doing is taking data and converting it into information that can be used to make real-time decisions. With supply-chain management, you have an idea of what levels of merchandise are in stock, what the sales rate is. You have tons of data today, the question is how do you organize it and convert it so you can make quick decisions.
Q: How do students entering Cal State’s business programs differ from their counterparts at other business schools?
A: I like to say we have one of the highest numbers of PHD “Poorest, Hungriest, Drive” students of any school in the country. We have some of the poorest students, the hungriest and ones with the most drive. Sixty percent of our students come from families below the poverty line. They’re not going to have access to the large institutions, not on a large scale.
Q: Are they equipped to compete?
A: We’re clearly a value-added institution. By the very nature of our institution, we do not attract the students with the greatest preparation. The intelligence I believe is very much the same. But economic circumstances determine, along with language, the level of preparation. Many of our students might not be as prepared as a student coming into Berkeley. If this were a 100-yard dash, someone who doesn’t have the preparation might have to run another 10 yards just to finish the race. By the special attention we give, the various programs, being innovative, we believe we close the gap.
Q: What advantages do your students possess?
A: One of the things I think is important is to have a worker who can function in a 21st century environment, and that’s a multicultural environment. That’s easier if you come from an institution or a city that is comprised of a wide variety of ethnicities. If you have a Hispanic student, he not only understands his own culture, but probably people from Korea, perhaps Germany, people from China. I see that as very powerful. This to me is very much of a competitive advantage.
Q: This stuff seems to really matter to you.
A: From early on my family instilled in me the belief that education was the equalizer. My parents did not have the opportunity to go to college and my mom did not go to high school. All the kids were told that education opens doors.
Q: You’ve also expanded the school’s alumni activities. What do they bring to the table?
A: It’s important to provide our students with role models. Just as important is to have outstanding people that recognize that the school gave them a start. Now they’re focusing on building with me some of the programs we’re not going to build a top-quality program if we simply focus on state funding. I need to garnish the resources if we are going to be able to offer, say, computers in the classroom. The third area would be to help us in terms of placing our students, finding employment opportunities.
Q: You’ve started an investment club with the help of an alumnus, investor Marshall Geller.
A: Cal State has to be an applied business program. We can talk about the theory of stocks, but how do you apply the theory on specific stocks in terms of valuations. That’s a great learning experience.
Q: How have employers responded?
A: In the four years that I’ve been here, we have had some major corporations step up in recognizing the value of our students. Citicorp, PepsiCo, many of the local firms. There is a tremendous demand for our students, much more than I would have anticipated.
Q: What roles do the partnerships play?
A: We’re working with the employer to make sure we produce students that fit their needs. We prepare the students to take jobs where they’re going to benefit and the company is going to benefit. We aren’t handing students off to a placement service at the end of their fourth year. Through Frito Lay we have developed a leadership center. We’re going to work together to identify the skill sets that our future leaders are going to require, beyond the curriculum.
Q: I’ve also noticed an emphasis on retail. What’s so special about retail at Cal State?
A: It is a major force in business. It’s hungry for students with a number of skills: information technology, merchandising, accounting and finance, being able to forecast the trends. We just see the layer of the person ringing up the sales, but it takes a lot to be successful.
Q: Cal State also has a high school program, right?
A: We have partnerships with seven high schools that we’re expanding, providing internships with various retailers, but also working with teachers. What we’re hoping to create is a pipeline, just like we’re doing with Pepsi, where we move students through high school, through college and turn them into productive citizens. We’ve graduated over 1,500 high school students from the College Incentive Program since 1981.
