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Hands Across the (Caspian) Sea
SCSU grant aims to build partnership with Azerbaijan biz school
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Business New Haven
12/23/2002
By: BNH
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Two professors in the business school at Southern Connecticut State University have been awarded a U.S. State Department grant to spend three years building partnerships with undergraduate business faculty at a private university in Azerbaijan.
SCSU economics and finance professor Sam Andoh and management professor Ellen Frank will receive $290,000 to help faculty at Khazar University in Baku, Azerbaijan develop new business programs.
The grant - the largest ever for SCSU's business school - will bring Khazar professors to the New Haven university to see how U.S. business classes operate, as well as support Southern professors' travel to Baku to work with Khazar faculty as they rework their own policies and procedures.
Andoh says the idea for an exchange came to him while in Azerbaijan in the spring of 2000. He was chatting with a local taxi driver, who made a remark that, recalls Andoh, seemed to capture the zeitgeist of the times.
“He told me, 'Nothing is working anymore,'” says Andoh. “This was his response to the breakdown of structures within his society after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991.”
At the time Andoh was spending five months at Khazar consulting with that school's business faculty on how to improve program offerings.
Created in the wake of the Soviet Union's fall, Khazar is one of just a handful of private universities in Azerbaijan, and faculty from universities around the world have been assisting the school as it grows.
As the nation makes the transition from a command economy to a market economy, Khazar's objective is to produce graduates equipped to weather a paradigm shift that can be “messy without the proper institutions,” says Andoh. “And in Azerbaijan the institutions are not there yet.”
Frank notes that under the Soviet model, formal business education was much more theoretical than its Western equivalent. “For example, they would teach economics but not marketing - you wouldn't have to market your product because you were the only game in town.”
Likewise, the science of management would have earned scant attention under the old model because, Franks says, “You just took the employees that were given to you. But now they need to put more thought into how to manage people.”
Andoh plans to travel to Baku next spring or summer, and Frank plans to visit the university in 2003 as well. In the 2003-04 academic year the grant will focus on helping Khazar faculty to develop syllabi as well as bring some of them to SCSU to observe Western-style classes.
In the grant's final year, Southern faculty will travel to Azerbaijan to monitor progress and see what lessons may be brought back tot heir own classes.
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