Building Connections
Ethics, liberal studies and technology help nurture tomorrow’s business leaders.
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| Gloria C. Larson, President, Bentley College |
“Only connect.” Those two simple words form the epigraph of one of the 20th century’s landmark novels, Howards End, by E.M. Forster. They also capture some of the most urgent imperatives that confront business and society today.
Forster, writing nearly 100 years ago, sought to connect England’s social classes through bonds of human understanding and sympathy. Today we need such ties even more, in a world less divided by class but torn apart by ethnic and religious conflict.
And in other ways that Forster could not have foreseen, our world demands that we make connections. This is what Bentley College, the model of a 21st-century business university, is all about.
Increasingly, our most important connections occur at the intersection of business with information technology, the arts and sciences and society.
Bentley connects business and information technology across all the business disciplines. In 1985, we were among the first universities in the world to require a laptop computer for all students. Today, information technology is an essential tool and topic in almost every course.
One example is our Corporate Immersion Program. Taking experiential learning to a new level, students in the program use the latest online and collaborative software tools to address market challenges and opportunities brought to us by our corporate partners. Significantly, our partner organizations — companies such as Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Welch’s and FreeFi Networks — attend and participate in every immersion class. Their involvement breeds deep personal connections to real business concerns on the part of students, who develop a real passion for their work.
We connect business with the arts and sciences by providing a creative and highly demanding liberal studies curriculum, which broadens students’ perspectives and hones their critical and creative thinking skills. A recent Stanford University review of undergraduate business programs found that Bentley “offers one of the strongest and most interesting examples of integrating business learning and liberal learning.”
We connect business and society by suffusing our entire curriculum with a deep understanding of business ethics, corporate social responsibility and global commerce and culture. They provide a moral compass, a sense of accountability and broad cultural awareness, encouraging our students to become engaged global citizens.
Leveraging our institutional strengths in business, technology, the arts and sciences and the principles of corporate social responsibility, Bentley offers undergraduate and graduate students new and progressive ways of thinking about and addressing complex issues. Our graduates will be ethically grounded leaders who combine “left brain” analysis and business process skills with “right brain” qualities of creativity, empathy and an appreciation for other perspectives. They will create and lead better organizations and help build better communities, wherever in the world they go.
