by Julie Bird Contributing writer

	Dr. Les Hudson

Dan Fogel knows what he wants in faculty members for the night and weekend MBA program he runs in Charlotte for Wake Forest University. 

The problem is, corporate America highly prizes those same skills and qualifications -- and pays a lot more to get them.

"Bank of America and Wachovia probably have more Ph.D.s in finance than all the schools in North Carolina," says Fogel, Wake Forest's associate dean for working professional MBA programs. "But they're pure researchers who probably do not know how to teach a class."

And that's one of the keys to finding a good faculty member, say Fogel and his counterparts at other N.C. business and MBA schools. They want instructors who are as talented and passionate about teaching as they are about their research and are willing to work for substantially less than they could command outside academia.

"The most important thing is that they want to be in the classroom, that they've got a love of teaching," says Ron Veith, director of the executive MBA program at Queens University of Charlotte. "They have to care for the students and be approachable and accessible."

Some of the qualifications business schools seek in their faculty are laid out in rules by the group that accredits MBA programs. For example, 90% of the faculty have to be "academically qualified," with a doctoral degree in their specialty.

But MBA schools have leeway in how much weight they place on other qualifications such as academic research, real-world business experience and contacts, and teaching skills.

Determining a candidate's teaching skills is a key consideration, says Marcia Stefan, assistant dean at Queens' McColl School of Business.

When interviewing prospective faculty members, the school will review student evaluations from previous classes. All candidates are required to present material to a class at Queens, with students assessing their performance, Stefan says.

A passion for teaching can also be determined during interviews as candidates talk about their work, she says.

"They love to teach, they like the students," she says. "They feel like they can help the students, and students can help them."

Faculty at Queens generally need to teach other graduate and undergraduate classes in addition to MBA classes, Stefan says. In some cases, though, a teacher might be more appropriate for undergraduate classes than for professional or executive MBA programs where the students have real-world experience and higher expectations, she says.

Chuck Bamford, the Dennis Thompson Chair of Entrepreneurial Studies at the McColl school, says executive MBA students have particularly high expectations of their professors because of their own work experience.

"They don't want superficial knowledge," he says. "They're here Friday and Saturday, and they want to apply it back at work on Monday."

Les Hudson, the Wayland Cato Chair in Leadership at the McColl school, is the type of professor MBA schools seek. Hudson spent most of his professional life as a textile company executive, including a stint as chief executive of the Dan River textile company, before going back to school to get his Ph.D.

"I found the students really reacted well to someone who had experience and taught theories," he says. "I'm on a couple of boards, and I like to say I bring the boardroom into the classroom."

Alan Shao, associate dean of global and professional programs at UNC Charlotte's Belk College of Business, agrees that significant professional experience gives faculty "a different vantage point. Students tend to believe faculty are more credible based on their real-world experience."

It doesn't matter whether they gained the experience before joining academia or from consulting or leading professional organizations, Shao says, as long as the instructor maintains business contacts and stays atop industry trends.

"We feel the best thing you can do in the classroom is make it as real world-applicable as possible," he says. "Trying to teach strictly from a book these days is incomplete."

Maintaining business ties also allows a professor to bring in guest lecturers, enriching the student experience. Faculty also need to stay connected to conduct viable research, Shao says.

Fogel says Wake's MBA programs invest heavily in research and seek faculty who can teach but also "produce original knowledge."

To do that, the university reduces teaching workloads and rewards faculty when their research is published, Fogel says. The MBA programs also try to attract researchers outside of academic settings to lead some classes, he says.

The focus on research has always been important, he says. "What has changed is the need for us to keep closer and closer to business."

At the same time, faculty need to be astute in separating fads from substantive movements that change how business is conducted. For example, Fogel says, some schools focused their curricula on the Total Quality Management movement in the 1990s only to see TQM quickly fall out of favor.

Process improvement is still in vogue, with companies using Six Sigma principles to boost efficiency. Wake addresses that discipline, but underlying the school's approach is an emphasis on "what it's like to implement innovations," Fogel says. "We're able to take a little more time to think about it, research and test it out with students."

Queens wants faculty research to be directly applicable to the classroom.
Hudson, for example, recently talked to his MBA business-strategy class about his case study on how Compass Group North America of Charlotte handles acquisitions.

The case study gives students a different take on the mergers and acquisitions business, says Hudson, who joined the McColl faculty in 2003.