Students looking forward to Markets and Management Studies’ entrepreneurship program will have to wait.
MMS Program Coordinator Bonnie Stevenson said the program has been canceled for the Spring semester. As a result, the highly anticipated course titled “The Start-Up Clinic”—which Elizabeth Spiers, Trinity ’99 and founding editor of Gawker.com, was supposed to teach—will not be offered.
Spiers said she found out the program was cancelled in an e-mail Oct. 27 from Gary Hull, a lecturing fellow in sociology who was going to serve as the program’s director. Hull could not be reached for comment Monday.
“I thought everything was fine,” she said in an interview with The Chronicle. “But then no one told me anything, and I wasn’t consulted—or communicated with, for that matter—at all during the process.”
Spiers initially expressed her dissatisfaction on her Tumblr account Oct. 29.
“I now have the unique distinction of having been fired from a job before even starting it,” Spiers wrote.
The plan was set to follow a structure similar to that of the FOCUS programs, an experience consisting of four courses that focus on an interdisciplinary theme. Spiers said her class would challenge students to create and implement original business plans.
Spiers said she believes the Duke administration was hesitant to offer business classes at the undergraduate level, but Spiers emphasized the importance of a more practical and application-driven education in her Tumblr post.
“Duke has always been really conflicted about business courses in its curriculum—they consider them “vocational” and tend to shove the necessary ones under the ‘economics’ rubric, even when they have nothing to do with econ,” she wrote. “Personally, I think all theory and no application is a luxury that no one can afford anymore, literally or figuratively, especially since the cost of higher ed has gone up so dramatically. But I’m a practitioner, not a Ph.D.”
Spiers said the demand for business classes is too great to be ignored, and added that Duke students have specifically expressed needs that are not necessarily being met.
“Whenever I attend Duke [to speak], I have Duke kids e-mailing me about entrepreneurship,” she said. “[Duke] should probably give these students the opportunity to have business training as well—right now you can be an Econ major, and that’s pretty much it.”
Junior Julia Hawkins interned with Spiers over the summer and took a prototype version of Spiers’ class in New York City, Hawkins said.
“[Spiers] has so much faith in her pupils, which inspires and empowers them to go out and achieve the far out goals in their heads,” Hawkins wrote in an e-mail Monday. “I think [the class’ cancellation] is a huge loss to students who operate entrepreneurially yet don’t have the resources or patience to execute. Duke ought to provide students with as much opportunity for success later on.”
Stevenson said that the entrepreneurship program was designed to allow MMS students to complete a concentration in entrepreneurship within one semester.
“There’s still gong to be an area of concentration within entrepreneurship, but it won’t be one semester’s worth of classes,” she said. “That’s how it is now—students complete a cluster within the certificate over the span of four years.”
Stevenson added that two of the four courses originally intended for the entrepreneurship program will still be offered independently, including Sociology 159: “The Sociology of Entrepreneurship” and MMS 147: “Business in Literature.”
The MMS program is also revamping its internal structure and is increasing its areas of concentration from three to five, Stevenson said. The additional concentrations are pending the MMS steering committee’s approval, which will meet in December.
The program’s cancellation follows the announcement of a new University entrepreneurial initiative, which aims to promote innovation both in and outside of the classroom. The campaign will be led by Duke Trustee Kimberly Jenkins, Trinity ’76, Graduate School ’77 and ’80, who assumed her position yesterday.
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