Every two or three weeks since Fall 2022, 13 faculty and teaching staff members have gathered to discuss the possibility of a business program at the University. Led by Chair of Economics Abigail Hornstein, the committee has reached many conclusions about the scope and curriculum they will propose for the major. The committee is partial to extensive deliberation and consensus-based decision making. As early as Fall 2024, they may be ready to formally propose the major to the University.

After learning about Hornstein’s initiative, Mathius Gazi ’25 reached out to her about completing a University major that would help him understand organizational decisions and prepare to work in consulting. Together, Hornstein and Gazi developed a plan for him to focus on international politics and quantitative analysis. Even though Gazi’s career plans have changed, he found his coursework useful for a recent internship in finance. He believes it could also serve him in settings beyond business, such as governmental offices or nonprofits.

For Spring 2023, Hornstein asked Carlotta Gidal ’23 and Kyle Roshankish ’24 to organize a half-credit pilot course called “Organizations in Society: Case Studies” (CSPL123). For each class period, Roshankish and Gidal invited a Wesleyan alum as a guest speaker to discuss how business principles come up in their careers. The guests included a union organizer, a rabbi who handles his synagogue’s finances, and a consultant at Berkshire Agriculture Venues who works with farmers on sustainable practices.

This breadth of scope is a keystone of the proposed program, and is reflected in its name. It began as Organizations in Society and is now the College of Organizations and Business in Society (COBS). While still indicating the study of a variety of groups and institutions, Hornstein and the committee sought to acknowledge the centrality of business with this name change.

“We will do all of us a favor if we use the word ‘business,’” Hornstein said. “Business is not the totality of organizational forms. It is not necessarily the mandatory focus for all individuals. But it is an inescapable organizational form.”

COBS is meant to provide a liberal arts approach to business and organizations, emphasizing ethics, sustainability, and social justice. Like the pilot class, it will cover organizations besides for-profit companies, such as nonprofits, arts organizations, civic associations, unions, and regulatory bodies like the Bar Association. The committee summarizes these as non-governmental and non-coercive organizations, excluding, for example, political parties and organized crime.

The pilot course took a broad view of not only what organizations use business principles but also the range of people that should be considered when analyzing an organization. A business is traditionally attentive to its relationship with shareholders, but students in the course also discussed “stakeholders,” which could include investors, customers, suppliers, employees, people next door who experience a factory’s pollution, and anyone else affected by an organization.

A current course, “Organizations in Society: Capitalism & Its Criticisms” (CSPL246), is also examining capitalism holistically. Taught by Visiting Assistant Professor of Public Policy Thanh Nguyen, who teaches in a department at Middlebury that resembles COBS, it is a pilot for a possible core class in the major.

“Capitalism is the dominant economic system around the world,” Hornstein said. “We think people should know what it is, the fact that there are different flavors of it, how it has evolved over time and location, and how it’s regulated through different means.”

The COBS curriculum has not been finalized, but it will likely include two core courses: the capitalism class, intended as a sophomore introduction to the major, and a class on ethics, meant for seniors. Students will probably also be required to take courses on accounting, quantitative analysis, and cross-cultural communication, as well as two economics courses.

Hornstein emphasized that students will be able to tailor their academic program to their interests. Someone interested in finance might fulfill the economics requirement with a banking class, while an aspiring labor organizer might select courses on labor economics or wealth dynamics. Students will round out the major with more eclectic electives, which may cover topics like psychology, urban environments, or the philosophy of finance.

Students and faculty have also discussed the role of COBS in providing career preparation. Gidal is enthusiastic about the new program, as she believes that excluding career preparation from academics is generally out of touch with students’ needs.

“To try to eliminate pre-professional curricular initiatives…strikes me as incredibly elitist because spinning a liberal arts education into employment is really difficult,” Gidal said. “[It] is much easier for people who already have the resources and the knowledge of the world that they’re trying to spin into.”

Hornstein agrees that students could apply this major in their future work, but she believes the role of COBS will be to train leaders and thinkers, rather than to provide software skills or highly specialized knowledge.

“Technical or vocational skills—that’s really about facilitating a smoother transition to your first job,” Hornstein said. “[COBS would be] training you with an education to carry you through your 40-plus-year working career, where you will presumably change industries, change roles, and change interests.”

Hornstein does anticipate opportunities for collaboration between COBS and the Gordon Career Center, such as events where students learn about a particular industry in broad terms. Roshankish also noted that the pilot course, which may be offered again as the program develops, allowed students to build personal connections with speakers and begin to think about translating their own education into a career.

Although many Wesleyan graduates go on to work at financial, technology, consulting, and media companies, students said the campus climate is a bit averse to the idea of business.

“I think many students on campus would say…that business has largely negative connotations, [viewed positively only] by the econ bros, people who want to go into finance,” Gidal said.

Since the fields of business and economics are academically and culturally intertwined, those developing this program have considered its relationship to the Economics Department and the distinct role it might play on campus. Students suggested that COBS will examine economic activity more qualitatively and from a wider range of perspectives.

Roshankish explained that economics courses often cover textbook-style solutions to business problems, but CSPL123 encompassed issues with no perfect resolution. For example, electric car development has the potential to reduce carbon emissions, but it requires damaging the environment through lithium mining. Roshankish, an economics and Environmental Studies major with a data analysis minor, thinks perspectives from a variety of fields enriched the discussions in CSPL123.

“The econ majors in this class [tend to be] utilitarian [if an action is] hurting some smaller groups of people, but it’s a better societal good,” Roshankish said. “Econ majors tend to focus [on] the balance sheets of these companies, like, ‘Oh, it’s not feasible because they can’t be running at a loss’…. We want to keep [COBS] separate from econ because we want that diversity of mind[s] and diversity of perspective.”

In fact, Roshankish said that early in the program’s development, the team sought to distance it from the Economics Department and the idea of business.

“We called the course ‘Organizations in Society’ because that’s incredibly vague,” Roshankish said. “We didn’t make it an econ listing because we didn’t want it to be associated with econ. All of these little decisions that we made—they were deliberate.”

Both Roshankish and Gidal, who majored in economics and the College of Social Studies, observe some social separation between the Economics Department and the rest of the student body. Gidal said students often associate majoring in economics with particular demographic qualities, such as coming from a privileged background, aspiring to work in finance, and being on a sports team. She described this as something of a stereotype, but said the community among economics majors does tend to center on athletics, recalling one of the classes she took in the department.

“The first three class sessions, we did almost nothing except learn about everyone’s sports team,” Gidal said. “I’ve noticed this happen particularly with male professors in the Econ Department: [The professor] went around and asked everyone what their nickname was on their sports team. So [I] got to learn about Jack Attack, and I think it was Beefcake, and George and Lenny.”

Gidal, as well as her only female classmate in the course, was among the three students not on a sports team, so the professor had the rest of the class assign them nicknames. She found the atmosphere fun, even though she ended up needing to drop the class.

Academically, Gazi anticipates significant overlap between students in COBS and those studying economics, which is typically the default for those who want to work in business. He thinks COBS might serve as a path of egress for economics students who find that they don’t enjoy the quantitative modeling and analysis central to economics. Some of his friends are currently making this discovery in “Microeconomic Analysis” (ECON301) and “Macroeconomic Analysis” (ECON302).

“They hate it,” Gazi said. “It’s so numbers-heavy. There’s a different letter of the Greek alphabet in every single equation. They’re not happy.”

Gazi thinks this pipeline might leave behind an Economics Department where a higher proportion of students enjoy quantitative reasoning.

“[COBS] would free up the Econ Department from people who don’t really love econ,” Gazi said. “A lot of the econ [majors are] just kids that wanted to do business school, and they thought econ was similar to business. But it’s not. Econ is more of a science, whereas business is more managerial.”

Gidal also believes these two disciplines serve different roles in society. Economic models are generally created and shared among academics who understand their limitations, whereas business writing and analysis are often meant to inspire immediate financial action, which can lead to overstatements of certainty.

“It is so hard…to prove causation that creating economy-wide models and general plans for how to achieve economic growth and success is almost impossible,” Gidal said. “These theories are disproved and re-proved every few decades. That’s not a secret inside the economics profession. But I think for the business world, so much is built around building up investor confidence, and you can’t build up investor confidence around shaky ideas.”

It will be interesting to see how COBS, which proposes to study business academically, addresses this tendency. Gidal hopes that COBS will draw on finance, marketing, political economy, social commentary, and other disciplines, rather than just the general idea of business, to deal with specific and meaningful issues.

Gazi mentioned that the focus on ethics will likely be helpful for students going into business careers, since many companies are eager to work on their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. However, Gidal believes the corporate understanding of ESG carries an assumption that she does not endorse: that profit is an organization’s central goal, and ethical conduct is a secondary consideration, or a way to maintain a good reputation. She believes profit can alternatively serve as a means to ethical goals and hopes the program’s students will grapple with this distinction.

“I think the other people on [the COBS] initiative were not coming in with that sort of philosophical take on ethics,” Gidal said. “They were [considering a situation of] having a lot of financial…resources, such as being in a position where you’re running an investment firm or you’re running a for-profit enterprise, and you’re trying not to cause net harm along the way…. I interpret it slightly differently in that you have some larger vision for the world or for projects or for other people, and you have to work through a capitalist system in order to achieve that.”

Anne Kiely can be reached at afkiely@wesleyan.edu.