Taking Action

Dear Members of the Zicklin Community,

We’re listening, we’re learning, and now we’re taking action to address systemic racism and its impact.

The Zicklin School of Business is one of the strongest engines for social mobility in this country as part of Baruch College, which ranks first in the nation. With our mission in mind, we have decided to take the following actions. ​

1. The Zicklin School is creating a task force, comprised of faculty, students, alumni, members of our Advisory Council, and community representatives. It will be co-chaired by our benefactor Larry Zicklin (BBA ’57) and Senior Associate Dean Paquita Davis-Friday. First we will look internally, promoting honest, open discussion and dialogue about ways we can improve as both a school and workplace. Then we will move forward, building a platform to help businesses achieve diversity, equity, and inclusion, through our executive education division and our ongoing work with the Robert Zicklin Center for Corporate Integrity, whose mission includes raising the ethical climate of American business to a higher plane.
2. We have engaged the nonprofit group Pollyanna Inc. to provide their unique conference models, discussion platforms, and racial literacy curricula. Faculty and staff will receive professional development training that includes an informative review of systemic racism, its impact, and ways we may create more equity.
3. Our leadership courses will incorporate feedback that we have received recently from students telling us that any discussion of effective leadership needs to include an understanding of “the impact that business leaders and corporations have in shaping discourse and policy in our country and abroad,” as one MBA student put it. And, as Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, said, “Only when companies and management are accountable in ways that are quantifiable will we see real systemic transformation of corporate America.”
4. Our Executive programs will expand their international study component to include work with nonprofits promoting racial and social justice.
5. For the Fall 2020 semester, our business consulting capstone course for graduate and Executive MBA students will offer pro bono consulting services to nonprofit organizations here in New York City, and to small businesses owned by underrepresented minorities.
6. We will continue to partner with the PhD Project through the Research Symposium, which brings underrepresented doctoral candidates to campus to provide support and feedback on their research.
7. We will add a service learning component to the recently revised undergraduate curriculum.

With input from students, faculty, staff, and the community, we will evaluate and measure the effectiveness of these efforts and update and revise them where needed.

As we learn to think and act more holistically around diversity and inclusion, we can bring our best selves to the task and make the most of all cultural competencies; Zicklin will learn and continuously improve as a result.

Sincerely,

H. Fenwick Huss
Willem Kooyker Dean
Zicklin School of Business