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Jon Bartley Calls Pooles’ Gift a ‘Game Changer’ as He Traces the College’s History

Jon Bartley called Pooles’ gift a ‘Game Changer’ as  reflected on the college’s history. Bartley was speaking on behalf of the faculty of the college at the December 17, 2010, announcement of a $37 million gift to the college and its naming as the Lonnie C. Poole Jr. College of Management. Following is a transcript of his remarks.

As Dean Weiss said, Lonnie and Carol Poole’s magnificent gift to the college marks the beginning of a new era for all of us here in Nelson Hall. The financial impact of their gift is dramatic. We can compete for top faculty talent and support high impact research even in this era of public austerity. We can invest in new academic programs and innovative courses that will help establish our graduates as leaders in their disciplines. These are the types of investments that our faculty desires – and that define world class business schools.

Almost as important as the financial impact of this gift is the status attached to a business school that is worthy of a naming gift by a respected business leader. In recent years, the faculty has felt that the College does not get the respect that it deserves. That changes today!

Twenty years ago, as we managed the transition from a Department of Economics to a Division and then to a College, we were desperately underfunded. We had less than half of the full-time faculty and staff that were needed and our offices were scattered across four buildings. We started our journey effectively without an endowment or a base of alumni donors to draw on for support. We were forced to bootstrap; we were an entrepreneurial enterprise.

For the first ten years many prospective students and members of the business community did not know NC State had a College of Management.

Our founding faculty and staff embraced the challenge because we recognized the opportunity to build a great business school from the ground up. Bob Clark and then Dick Lewis, our founding Dean, provided strong leadership in those initial years.

They worked with our faculty and our early supporters in the business community – individuals like Smedes York, Steve Stroud, and Jim Beck – to overcome the tremendous obstacles that lay between what we were and what we knew our students and the State of North Carolina deserved from its largest university.

We began to grow our faculty; we revamped the undergraduate curricula, renovated Nelson Hall, launched a Master of Accounting program, and in 2000 achieved the critical milestone of accreditation by AACSB. In the years that followed, we launched the MBA and Executive Education, and we founded several initiatives that engaged the business community.

More recently, with the leadership of Dean Weiss and Associate Dean Allen, we expanded the reach of our MBA program to an RPT campus – and beginning next year, on to the Internet.

We also began opening new opportunities for our students and faculty through joint programs offered with other colleges at NC State and a joint Master of Global Innovation program with AIE University in France.

As we have demonstrated success, more and more business leaders stepped forward and gave us their vote of confidence and financial support. The college would not merit the naming gift by Lonnie and Carol Poole today if we had not had the early support of individuals such as Allen Dickson, Lloyd Langdon, Ed Woolard, EC Hunt, Ben Jenkins, Jim Owens, and Steve Zelnick, and companies including Wachovia, Bank of America, RBC, BB&T, and the major public accounting firms.

Lonnie and Carol Poole’s gift is a game changer. It gives us the incremental resources and enhanced status that will make it possible to achieve the greater excellence that we aspire to, and that the people of North Carolina deserve.

As a faculty member, I am very proud that Lonnie Poole’s name will be attached to our college. He is the rare entrepreneur who founds a company and successfully manages and builds it into a major corporation. And most important, Waste Industries is a corporation with a reputation for high ethical standards, innovation, and strong environmental protection.

Lonnie Poole represents the very qualities and level of success that we are striving to achieve. On behalf of the faculty, I want to say that we are honored by your name, Lonnie, and we pledge to use your gift wisely in pursuit of the very qualities that you personally exhibit. Thank you.

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