DIVINE MBA

By PAUL HUGHES

With Enron Corp. starting to fade from the public’s memory, Hewlett-Packard Co. helped remind people that businesses can go off-track in seeing how far rules will bend.

That has business schools talking a lot more about ethics these days. None as much as Orange County’s religious schools.

They’re offering business degrees and courses and putting up buildings dedicated to finding just how much you can study, if not serve, both God and mammon.

The religious schools turn out but a fraction of the business graduates at the county’s big schools,the University of California, Irvine, California State University, Fullerton, and Chapman University.

But the schools are part of the university landscape here, drawing faith-minded students and donors. Here’s a look at the area’s larger religious universities and their business teachings.

Biola University, La Mirada

A year ago, Biola University broke ground on its Crowell School of Business.

The business school is set to open for the spring semester, said Bob Harriman, program administrator for Biola’s master’s of business administration program.

“If everything goes well, it could be open sometime at the end of January, or the middle of February,” he said.

Biola, just over the line in Los Angeles County, is a big draw for students from OC. About half of the school’s 30 business students are from here.

The campus is mostly Protestant and evangelical, though it’s not affiliated with a particular church. You’ve got to be a Christian to attend, teach or work there, and the Theology Department signs off on faculty.

The business school is named for the late Donald Crowell Sr. of Crowell, Weedon & Co. Crowell’s sons Andrew Crowell and Don Crowell Jr. gave the naming gift in his honor.

The senior Crowell was the son of the founder of investment bank Crowell, Weedon. The family has supported Biola since the school’s founding in 1906.

Andrew Crowell gave the opening address for the groundbreaking ceremony last year.

“Today isn’t about building with bricks and mortar,” Crowell said at the time. “It’s about building the Kingdom of God.”

The school would help train “Christian business leaders (who) see the marketplace as their parish and their business as their pulpit,” Crowell said.

The building is designed for 32,000 square feet with 12 classrooms, 11 meeting and study rooms, a computer lab, staff and faculty offices and an outdoor eating area.

The project is set to cost $14.8 million, Harriman said, including a $2.2 million maintenance endowment.

The business school recruits mainly from Los Angeles and Orange counties, he said. Students have come from as far away as Lancaster and San Diego.

Each MBA student has a professional mentor, often senior managers or business owners, according to Harriman. Part of the aim: have professionals show students how to mix their beliefs with business.

“It’s an additional resource for students,” Harriman said. “We are trying to show them how business can be a ministry.”

Concordia University, Irvine

Concordia University, a Lutheran school, has been busy with plans to open an Education Business Technology Center next spring and the start of an MBA program in business practice.

The business technology center is designed to bring the business department under one roof, with a techie twist: streaming video of class sessions, smarter-than-smart display boards, automatic taping of classes and a slew of new Apple computers.

“Faculty can actually face the students and write on a screen, and it appears on the board behind them,” said John Rooney, academic dean for the school of business. “It’s one version up from Smart Boards.”

Concordia’s new MBA has students taking five core courses, then selecting five others to focus on what they want to learn, say, human resources, venture capital, finance or others.

The campus still has its standard MBA, with 10 courses chosen for students.

The new effort “is asking students what they want to learn,” Rooney said.

“We’re trying to make it more experiential, where students are doing something and applying the information they learn,” he said.

“If they want to, say, write a code of ethics, we match them with a company that needs that,” Rooney said.

If students already are working, projects push them beyond what they’re used to, he said.

“If it were someone in a business, they would have to do something outside of their company or area,” he said.

The program focuses on flexibility, developing skills, theory, business as well as startup and leadership techniques, Concordia spokesman Doug Fleischli said.

“It’s practical insight for integrating Christian values in the business marketplace,” he said.

The new tech center is named for the late Robert Alan Grimm, an OC native whose family owns part of carrot grower Grimmway Farms in Bakersfield.

Full-time professors at Concordia have to be Lutheran. Concordia is affiliated with the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, part of the 10-campus Concordia University system.

Hope International University, Fullerton

Hope International University, a non-denominational Christian school, offers four graduate business programs,three MBAs (management, not-for-profit management and international development) and a master’s of science in management.

In the past year, the school has revamped courses in all four areas, said Lind Coop, chairman of the department of management in the school of graduate studies at Hope International.

In not-for-profit management, Hope International now offers a course teaching students how to organize, recruit and deal with boards of directors, Coop said.

All courses now can be taken online.

“You can go to the evening classes, take them online, do both simultaneously, or switch in and out,” Coop said.

Some graduate business students attend classes in between traveling for their jobs and then continue the course online, according to Coop.

“You can swap back and forth between traditional and online,” he said.

Hope International ends up training a lot of executives for overseas missions and charities, Coop said.

“We have lots of medical, food and services missionaries,” he said.

With online courses, “We’ve had students from Ecuador, Nigeria, and China all online at the same time,” Coop said.

Hope International has about 100 students in all four business programs, he said.

“We’re training management people and workers not to make big money but to make a big difference,” Coop said.

Students have gone on to work for Evangelical Christian Credit Union, Raytheon Co., Home Depot Inc. and religious charities Food for the Hungry International and World Impact.

Soka University of America,

Aliso Viejo

Strictly speaking, Soka University isn’t a religious school. But it is “founded on Buddhist principles,” said Edward Feasel, dean of faculty and professor of economics.

Those principles are “peace, human rights, and sanctity of life,” Feasel said.

Those ideals definitely come out in the curriculum, he said.

“It’s not religious instruction,” Feasel said. “It’s a culture that’s fostered. Faculty and students here are not just focused on knowledge acquisition, but how it can be put into practice.”

Soka students worked in a two-year program to present an economic report on South County, Feasel said. It’s similar to Chapman University’s countywide survey, he said.

“Soka is trying to initiate it on a sub-county level,” Feasel said.

The idea came from a Laguna Niguel councilman, with support from the Coastal Chamber Legislative Coalition. The coalition represents five South County chambers of commerce.

Soka presented its first economic survey in April. Next April should see another.

Students have interned with county supervisors and Morgan Stanley, Feasel said.

Overall, the school offers a four-year liberal arts program with three concentrations: international studies, humanities and social and behavioral sciences.

Under that, “we have a full set of economics classes,” Feasel said.

The school has about 400 students, admitting 100 with each freshman class.

“These students are about changing the world,” Feasel said. “Not just about making all the money you can, but being successful and at the same time contributing to a more harmonious and peaceful society.”

Vanguard University, Costa Mesa

Vanguard University, a Christian school tied to the Southern California Assemblies of God, started its MBA program this year with 20 students, said Dave Alford, dean of the school of business and management.

About two-thirds of the students are men, he said.

The university opened a building to house its business school, Alford said.

The MBA is offered at night for people already working, he said.

Taking a couple classes each term, students can finish in five semesters or about 20 months, according to Alford.

Students, who don’t have to be religious, like the staff and take 10 courses, he said, with a focus on leadership. “Emerging Issues in Leadership” is one course. “Leading Organizations Effectively” is another.

“The common features are that they are working, living in Orange County, doing some management, and interested in leadership,” Alford said.

Other courses include quantitative emphasis: accounting, finance, decision analysis.

“Corporate governance,” is a hot topic right now, Alford said, especially in light of the Hewlett-Packard corporate spying issue.

“Another emphasis is ethics,” he said. “In any course in the curriculum, we’re talking about ethics.”