David Nazarian College of Business and Economics

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Dean's Message July 2014

Dear Alumni and Friends of CSUN and the David Nazarian College of Business and Economics,

Recently, some 1500 graduates marched across the commencement platform on CSUN’s Oviatt Library lawn to receive their baccalaureate degrees in various business and economics disciplines, master of business administration, master of science in accountancy, and master of science in taxation degrees.    Capping a historic year, they became the inaugural graduating class of the newly named David Nazarian College of Business and Economics.  CSUN’s long-time supporter, collaborator, champion and friend, Mr. William C. “Bill” Allen, president and CEO of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, was awarded the University’s highest honor, an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, at the event.  Priskila Melvin Layesen (accounting, finance and Business Honors, with a perfect 4.0 grade-point average) and Huong Tran (accounting) were named as recipients of the College’s highest undergraduate distinction, the Warner K. Masters Award. 

Commencement also marked the end of my first academic year as dean, and what a year it has been!  I have been overwhelmed by the gracious responses that have flowed in from my colleagues on campus and alumni and friends here in California, across the nation and around the world, as the Nazarian College became a reality and a dizzying array of student, alumni, faculty and staff achievements brought new recognition and opportunity.

About two months ago, I had the opportunity of sharing with you the good news of the naming of the David Nazarian College of Business and Economics.  David’s is a classic CSUN story of a working, first-generation American confronting adversity head-on to take advantage of the quality education available to him at CSUN, graduating with a finance degree in 1982, and then leveraging it to make the world a better place through a lifetime of remarkable business success and generous philanthropy.  His desire to provide that same opportunity to current and future generations of CSUN students now propels us into a new chapter in the history of this great institution, thanks to his transformative $10 million gift and leadership of a campaign to raise an additional $15 million.  David and I hope you will consider joining the many friends and alumni who are jumping in to support that campaign (follow the link at the bottom of this newsletter).

Another CSUN alumnus and benefactor, Harvey Bookstein, CPA (1970, accounting), entertained and inspired a large and audience on April 29 at a book-signing event for his recently published Wake-Up Call: How I Changed My Life and Business – and You Can Too (NorLights Press, 2013).  The evening was vintage Harvey – thought-provoking, hilarious, brutally honest, insightful and completely engaging.

In U.S. News & World Report’s ranking of “Best Part-Time MBA Programs,” released since the prior issue of the Bottom Line, our MBA Program rose 32 spots from its position last year.  This is the third consecutive year that our program has appeared in the elite ranking.  Only AACSB-accredited programs (about five percent of business-degree-granting institutions around the world) are considered for the honor.  Part-time MBA programs within that select group of colleges and universities are then evaluated on the basis of peer-assessments from deans and program directors at other institutions and entering students’ GMAT and GRE scores, undergraduate grade-point-averages and work experience.  Our regular appearance and rising position in the ranking indicate that the program is among the best of the best.

Adding to competition accolades reported in earlier issues of the Bottom Line, a team of our CSUN Information Systems students won first place in the annual IT Competition at Cal Poly Pomona.  In walking away with the victory, telecommunications team members David Angel, Roy Zarate, Daniel Harrington and Cameron Aziz (coached by Dr. Richard Ye) added to an impressive multi-year streak of first-place CSUN finishes at this annual event.   

Nazarian College faculty members have come in for top awards for their groundbreaking work in scholarship and pedagogy in recent months.  It was a personal thrill for me to rise to my feet, along with other marketing educators from around the world, to recognize Dr. Barbara Gross as the Marketing Educator of the Year, a recognition conferred by the Marketing Educators’ Association Conference at its 2014 conference.  The California Society of Certified Public Accountants conferred its prestigious 2014 Outstanding Educator Award on Rafi Efrat at CalCPA’s annual meeting on June 19 at the Renaissance Palm Spring Hotel.  It is hardly necessary to elaborate on the incredible honor it is to be chosen from the hundreds of accounting educators at top universities throughout California.  Institutional Investor Journals, a consortium of a dozen of the most influential scholarly journals in the finance discipline, bestowed their 2013 ETF/Indexing Paper of the Year award – one of the very few recognitions in the academic-research domain that recognizes a paper as being the best not just in one journal but across multiple publications – on Drs. James Chong and G. Michael Phillips for “Low (Economic) Volatility Investing,” which appeared in The Journal of Wealth Management.  Additionally, Dr. Sung Wook Yoon’s “Goodwill Accounting and Asymmetric Timeliness of Earnings” was recognized by the editorial team of Review of Accounting and Finance as that journal’s Outstanding Paper of 2013, Dr. Julia Hoch’s “Vertical and Shared Leadership Processes: Exploring Team Leadership Dynamics” was judged as a best paper in the Organizational Behavior Division of the 2014 Academy of Management Meeting, to be held in Philadelphia in August, and Dr. Gerard Rossy’s novel case, about an NGO in Afghanistan that teaches youth in that troubled country to skateboard, was named the best sports case by the Western Case Writers Association. 

Even as awards come in recognizing past scholarship, our productive faculty continue their publication success.  Drs. James Chong, William Jennings and G. Michael Phillips’“Monitoring the Five Risks: Analytical Risk Measurement for Retail Investors and Wealth Managers” appeared in Investments & Wealth Monitor (a magazine that prints articles by award-winning authors and whose contributors include an impressive list of Nobel Prize winners and academic and industry leaders) and Dr. Julia Hoch’s “Leading Virtual Teams: Hierarchical Leadership, Structural Supports, and Shared Team Leadership” was just published by the prestigious Journal of Applied Psychology.  Soon to be published in some of the very top journals in the disciplines of management and marketing are Dr. Sandy Green’s “A Rhetorical Model of Institutional Decision Making (Academy of Management Review) and Dr. Stephen Samaha’s “The Role of Culture in International Relationship Marketing” (Journal of Marketing).  Other forthcoming work includes Drs. David Ackerman and Barbara Gross’s “Having Many Choice Options Seems Like a Great Idea, But . . .: Student Perceptions About the Level of Choice for a Project Topic in a Marketing Course” (Journal of Marketing Education), Dr. Kristine Beck’s “A Capital Market Test of Corporate Capital Structure:  Does an Optimal Industry Capital Structure Exist?” (Financial Decisions), Dr. Nanci Carr’s “Intellectual Property Issues Associated with Biorepositories: Current Practices” (Atlantic Law Journal), Dr. Julia Hoch’s “Shared Leadership, Diversity, and Information Sharing in Teams” (Journal of Managerial Psychology)  and Professor Sheila Walker’s ““Return Patterns: An Underappreciated Risk Factor” (The Journal of American Business Review, Cambridge). 

The students, faculty, staff, administration and friends of the Nazarian College have been saddened by the recent passing of a beloved colleague and friend, Dr. Oscar W. DeShields, Jr., professor of marketing.  Dr. DeShields’ contributions to our students and programs in multiple capacities, the nationwide impact of his award-winning efforts to create elevated opportunity for doctoral education and academic placement for graduate students from underrepresented population groups through the Ph.D. Project, and the lasting influence of his work on marketing theory and pedagogy (e.g., nearly 700 citations of his work as documented by Google Scholar) are undisputed, but beyond all of that are the countless ways in which Oscar touched thousands of lives.  The Nazarian College is and will continue to be better because of his dedicated, caring and inspired contributions and this issue of the Bottom Line is lovingly dedicated to his memory.

Please read the other articles in this issue and enjoy learning more of the David Nazarian College of Business and Economics.  Thanks for your continuing interest and support.

With warm regards,

Kenneth R. Lord, Ph.D.

Dean

David Nazarian College of Business and Economics