Saturday, January 27, 2007

Business, hospitality management merge

FIU administrators have announced that the School of Hospitality Management is now a self-governing unit within the College of Business Administration at the Biscayne Bay Campus.

Merging the two schools in order to better serve BBC business and hospitality management students was proposed by Mark Rosenberg, provost and executive vice president of Academic Affairs.

"The College of Business Administration doesn't have enough money to adequately staff the school the way that it is staffed at the [University Park] campus," said Joseph West, associate dean of SHM. "So we're going to help them."

Both schools will remain individual entities offering their own separate degree programs, maintaining individual budgets and hiring their own professors. The major difference now, according to West, is that as of this fall, the schools will be sharing faculty members and facilities.

This faculty sharing is possible due to overlaps in the course requirements of students seeking degrees from each respective school. To expand class offerings and because of CBA's inability to hire new teachers due to its limited financial resources, faculty members who teach introductory courses in SHM will now teach some of those same courses to business students at BBC. Some professors who usually teach three or four classes will end up with an extra class in the fall.

"Hospitality is a business and a number of the courses that hospitality students take are similar to courses that business students take," West said. "Hospitality faculty have similar credentials to business [faculty]. Our law professors can teach not only hotel law and travel law; they can also teach basic business law."

In the fall, some of the courses required by degree-seeking students in both schools, including some introductory marketing and management classes, will be co-listed as both business and hospitality management courses, said Lee Dickson, associate dean of SHM.



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