Joining faculty from notable peer schools like Stanford Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School and Michigan's Ross School of Business, UCLA has received the 2010 Dr. Alfred and Lynn Manos Page Prize for Sustainability Issues in Business Curricula. The Page Prize encourages efforts to expose business students to state-of-the-art environmental sustainability knowledge.
In Westwood, this state of the art curricula is the Leaders In Sustainability certificate program now housed in UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability where UCLA Anderson Professors Charles Corbett (pictured right) and Magali Delmas serve as co-directors. Corbett credits UCLA Anderson Dean Judy Olian for her -- and Anderson's -- commitment to the program. "The dean has been very supportive," Corbett said, "and early on (Judy) provided much of the seed money that got the program started."
According to Corbett, who also serves as Anderson's chairman of the faculty and is the Joseph Jacobs Term Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies, the program was created five years ago and was/is aimed at graduate students with an interest in sustainability.
To earn the certificate, students must take (in addition to the core course) three other classes, at least one of which is outside their "home school." The must also complete a project that "demonstrates some form of leadership" as it pertains to sustainability.
Crucial to the program's curricula is its interdisciplinary nature. There are currently about 130 graduate students enrolled in the program with about one-third coming from among Anderson's various MBA and PhD programs. The rest of the participants come from across campus, including (but not limited to) students in urban planning, public policy, molecular toxicology, sociology, environmental health science and civil engineering. "The point is to get students to know each other (across disciplines) and to become expose to a broader perspective," Corbett said. "In my class (which is the core class in the certificate program) we bring in different guest lecturers. One day we'll discuss the Gulf oil spill with a public health expert and the next class we'll discuss obesity with a sociologist."
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