23rd Annual IAJBS World Forum
Posted by Joseph Phillips on Wednesday, July 26, 2017 at 8:51 AM PDT
The 23rd Annual International Association of Jesuit Business Schools (IAJBS) World Forum took place in Namur, Belgium from July 16-18. Including myself, there were six attendees from Albers and one faculty member from the School of New and Continuing Studies. The event brought together 130 faculty from 19 different countries, 5 different continents, and 50 different universities and institutes. The 24th World Forum will take place at Seattle University, July 22-25, 2018! Mark your calendars! We are looking forward to hosting!
Our faculty managed to deliver five papers at the conference, despite being sidetracked by a beer tasting river cruise and dinner in a castle! The cruise featured the five different beers brewed by the monks who run the Chimay brewery. Chimay Blue was the clear favorite for the Albers crowd and the other conference participants.
Namur is at the junction of two rivers, the Meuse and Sambre, and since this made it a strategic location back in the middle ages, naturally there is a big castle, the Citadel, looming over the river junction. While the Citadel looks formidable, over its history it was under siege 21 times and each time the castle fell. Zero for 21 is not good in any sport!
The University of Namur was the host institution for the conference, and it happens to be the only Jesuit university in Europe outside of Spain. Namur is a town of about 110,000 in the French speaking part of Belgium (Wallonia), and while not high on the list of places to see in Belgium, it is actually a spot worth visiting if you have the opportunity. Besides the castle, it has a very walkable downtown core with many narrow streets free of automobile traffic, exactly what a tourist hopes to find in a European town! I really do not understand why Rick Steves does not cover it in his guide for Belgium!
The IAJBS is an organization that brings together the deans of Jesuit business schools around the world. Our board has members from the US, Latin America, Europe, India and Asia. The main activity of IAJBS is to organize the annual World Forum that brings faculty and administrators together from a variety of Jesuit institutions around the globe. These gatherings facilitate collaboration between the business schools, whether that is joint programs (the University of San Francisco, IQS in Barcelona, and Fu Jen in Taiwan jointly deliver a master’s degree program), faculty collaboration in research, sponsorship of the Journal of Management for Global Sustainability, or sharing best practices in Jesuit business education.
Every four years, IAJBS is joined at the World Forum by Colleagues in Jesuit Business Education (CJBE), which is a group of US Jesuit business school faculty who collaborate and share around the delivery of Jesuit business education. CJBE will be joining us in Seattle for its Twentieth Annual Conference next year. Ironically, CJBE was founded in 1998 and its first conference was held at Seattle University! They have not been back since, but we are happy to have them in 2018! To mark the occasion, we are welcoming Fr. Bob Spitzer, SJ, to give a keynote address. Fr. Spitzer, former president of Gonzaga, was instrumental in the founding of CJBE while a faculty member at SU!
Fr. Michael Garanzini, SJ, Secretary for Higher Education for the Jesuits, was at the World Forum, and delivered a keynote address about his plans to establish the International Association of Jesuit Universities (IAJU), indicating that he saw IAJBS as model for organizing other Jesuit activities in higher education on a global basis. He will be convening a meeting in July, 2018 of Jesuit university presidents from around the world to launch this initiative.
The 23rd Annual World Forum was another successful event for IAJBS. Now it falls to us to host a successful 24th Annual IAJBS World Forum in Seattle in 2018!