AAC&U News | July/August 2004

Wake Forest University Brings Entrepreneurial Spirit to Undergraduate Education

Beginning this fall, undergraduates at Wake Forest University will have the opportunity to learn about entrepreneurship while pursuing degrees in the liberal arts and sciences, thanks to a five-year grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City. Wake Forest, already known for entrepreneurship education at its Wayne Calloway School of Business and Accountancy and its Babcock Graduate School of Management, now plans to bring entrepreneurship education into the liberal arts curriculum and expand support for entrepreneurial students outside the classroom.

One goal of this initiative, according to Elizabeth Gatewood, the director of the school's newly created Office of Entrepreneurship and Liberal Arts, is to "infuse an entrepreneurial spirit into the Wake Forest community." At the same time, Wake Forest--along with the seven other campuses selected to receive support from the Kauffman Foundation--hopes to transform the way entrepreneurship is understood. Guided by a belief that responsible entrepreneurship can serve the public good, Wake Forest expects the initiative to promote civic engagement, benefit the local Winston-Salem community, and prompt students to think more critically about the social and ethical implications of their actions.

Defining "Entrepreneurship"

The expansion of entrepreneurship courses--which often is seen as an unwelcome incursion of the culture of "business" into schools of liberal arts--has caused concern on some campuses. Bill Conner, a biology professor who serves as Wake Forest's entrepreneurship program director for curriculum initiatives, acknowledges that entrepreneurship has "negative connotations" for many academics. The Kauffman Foundation's capacious definition of entrepreneurship as the creation of value, however, has largely dispelled what Conner describes as "initial fears of the e-word": "That value doesn't necessarily need to be monetary value," explains Conner. "It can be social value, it can be political value."

Professor Conner also points out that students at Wake Forest were practicing social entrepreneurship long before the school embarked upon the new initiative. He cites Project Bokonon, which is dedicated to improving medical care in rural Benin, and Project Hope, which sends undergraduates to India every year to work with the poor, as programs that exemplify the socially conscious "entrepreneurial spirit" of Wake Forest students. The grant application process, Conner says, "opened the faculty's eyes to the hunger that students have for these types of projects. They've been developing them on their own in spite of us, and we might as well work with them."

Program leaders also predict that more conventional types of entrepreneurship will benefit from the initiative's attention to community. "I think we've seen in the last decade or so that there was too much emphasis on creating wealth for individuals, and maybe not enough emphasis on creating value in the broader sense," Elizabeth Gatewood says. She hopes that students at Wake Forest's business programs will participate in and learn from the broader discussion of entrepreneurship on campus.

Entrepreneurship in the Curriculum

As part of the initiative, over the next five years Wake Forest will integrate entrepreneurship courses into the arts and sciences curriculum. This fall, first-year seminars in English and women's studies, economics, sociology, biology, and theater will feature "entrepreneurship" components; in subsequent years, the number and range of first-year seminars will increase, and entrepreneurship seminars will be added at the sophomore, junior, and senior levels.

Many of these courses will introduce students to career opportunities, and provide practical experience, in their chosen discipline. For instance, in a planned theater course on "show business," students will learn how to develop professional portfolios, how to showcase their talents, and even how to start a theater company. "Theater is entrepreneurial," explains Sharon Andrews, associate professor of theater and entrepreneurship program director for communications. "You have to know how to get your work out there and how to market yourself." Ultimately, she says, higher education should "empower students to create their lives," and this sentiment informs many of the new entrepreneurship courses--whether the students are learning how to pitch their acting experience or visiting local companies to learn about the biotech industry.

Other courses will analyze entrepreneurship in historical, sociological, and theoretical contexts. Anne Boyle, a professor of English and women's studies who will teach a course called "Women Entrepreneurs in Literature and Life" this fall, plans to focus on the experiences of women entrepreneurs. Beginning with readings in late-nineteenth-century women's fiction and culminating with visits to class from local women entrepreneurs, her course will explore how and why women have struggled--often against existing social structures--to "make a life for themselves." "Making a life involves more than making a living," Professor Boyle explains, "and students can begin to understand the difference in these two concepts by exploring theories regarding gender and culture, by reading historic and literary texts regarding women entrepreneurs and by analyzing these through a feminist lens."

Creating Opportunities

In addition to developing new courses, Wake Forest will also build a new center to offer extracurricular support to entrepreneurial undergraduates. The planned University Center for Entrepreneurship would provide a place where students could gather to compare ideas and share experience, and where students with specialized knowledge--on how to launch a nonprofit, for example--could advise novices.

The new facility would also serve as a "fifth-year center," a capstone to a student's entrepreneurship education. As curriculum director Bill Conner envisions it, the center would be a resource for recent graduates who choose "to continue work in entrepreneurship that they started when they were undergraduates"--a year at the center would thus be a fitting conclusion to the program, supporting young graduates as they test their new knowledge and skills in the world beyond campus.

The success of Wake Forest's initiative will be measured in part by the success of those graduates; at the same time, to ensure that its new programs survive past the five-year term of the grant, the school must prove that entrepreneurship education belongs in the liberal arts and sciences. Director Elizabeth Gatewood is confident in the initiative's future, pointing out the similarities between the university's mission and the intellectual demands of the entrepreneurial process: "Pursuing opportunities in environments that typically are very complex, and changing," she says, "requires an entrepreneur to evaluate evidence and make decisions." In the coming years, Wake Forest University will seek to demonstrate that these skills--along with the creativity and daring typically associated with entrepreneurship--complement the skills fostered by a liberal education.

More information about this and other entrepreneurship initiatives is available at the Kauffman Foundation Web site; Wake Forest University also has information about their initiative online.

AAC&U recently announced a partnership with the Consortium for Liberal Education and Entrepreneurship at the College of Charleston. With support from the Kauffman Foundation, AAC&U's Center for Liberal Education and Civic Engagement and the Consortium for Liberal Education and Entrepreneurship will sponsor a national symposium and a series of publications to explore how the idea of an entrepreneurial spirit--imbued with a sense of social responsibility--can reinvigorate contemporary understandings of liberal education. The symposium, "Working Convergences: Liberal Education, Creativity, and the Entrepreneurial Spirit," will be held on January 26, 2005, in conjunction with AAC&U's Annual Meeting. A press release announcing this new partnership can be viewed online.