Values Statement
We, the faculty in the Department of Business, support our mission through excellent teaching, impactful scholarly activity, and engaged service to the University, the local community, the State, and to our management and accounting fields and professions. We espouse the following shared values that underscore our mission statement and strategic planning priorities, along with our stakeholder and accreditor expectations.
Teaching
Our teaching should incorporate innovative pedagogy that inspires students to think critically when identifying, analyzing, and solving organizational problems. Our instruction often involves experiential learning activities that afford students opportunities to apply theory and concepts while interacting with divergent perspectives across sectors, professions, disciplines, and cultures here and abroad. The Department places a great deal of importance on creating enhanced opportunities for close faculty-student interaction and student-centered learning. For many of our courses, the faculty share an appreciation for multi- and interdisciplinary course content in the study of organizations in society. Teaching across disciplines, such as in the humanities and in other areas to support the Liberal Arts Core, underscores our perspective that the study of organizations is a liberal art. As such, our faculty benefit by participating in the university’s shared curricula. This engagement with students and colleagues across campus will help inform our understanding and application of multiple perspectives, which will in turn support our students’ learning experience. Additionally, this will support our efforts to share how our work as organizational teacher-scholars might inform other disciplines. Lastly, central to our strategic efforts to continuously improve, we place a strong emphasis on faculty giving and receiving timely, regular, and substantive feedback about the design, delivery, and impact of teaching on student learning.
Scholarly Activity
The Department recognizes that individual faculty members each have different avenues for their scholarship, both from a content perspective and in terms of where scholarly pursuits manifest themselves. Per our policy, tenure-track must engage in activities to maintain Scholarly Academic status; the tenured faculty should engage in activities to maintain Scholarly Academic status. To do so, faculty must publish a minimum of two peer reviewed journal articles in acceptable outlets, or one peer reviewed journal article and a single book, and engage in another scholarly activity all within a five- year reaccreditation review period. The latter may include conference presentations, published conference proceedings, and book chapters, among others. Faculty who hold the Associate Professor rank for five years or are a full-time contract lecturers with a terminal degree may maintain status as a Practice Academic (PA). That would include, over the course of the five-year review period, publishing a single peer-reviewed journal article, a book, or another scholarly activity and engaging in two, sustained activities to support external stakeholders such as consulting, service on non- academic boards of directors, and the like. Additional information on scholarly expectations for tenure-track and senior faculty is available in our policy on Faculty Qualifications and Engagement.
We believe in knowledge and inquiry that contributes to the disciplinary and multi-/ interdisciplinary nature of our fields. We also place value on research that contributes to the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL); these efforts inform pedagogical innovation and curricular debate here at UNC Asheville and in other higher education arenas. Faculty are encouraged to engage in the practice of scholarship by sharing their work, for example, by effectively incorporating results into the classroom. Collaboration both here and outside of UNC Asheville (and both within and outside our disciplines) is encouraged. Collaborative research includes the work we do with students on undergraduate research projects. Fruitful collaboration is encouraged as a means to maintain a productive, impactful, and creative scholarly agenda.
Service
We place a high value on faculty service to the Department, to the University, and to the greater community. As with scholarship, our faculty engage in service through many creative and individual pursuits. Service should stem from each individual’s passion to contribute to the Department’s wide array of stakeholders. We value faculty activities “that involve substantive linkages to practice, consulting, other forms of professional engagement, etc.” (Standard 15). We also value academic presentations to professional associations, organizations, or disciplinary bodies/affinity groups. Our service roles often embrace impactful and collegial citizenship that supports disciplinary, departmental, and university missions. We feel that service includes the one-on-one relationships we forge with students. These relationships are built through academic advising, mentoring, project- based internships, consulting, and advising on undergraduate research projects.
Mission
The Department of Business provides undergraduate degree programs of excellence in accounting and management. We develop lifelong learners, critical thinkers, and effective communicators who understand that learning is a collaborative, reflective process requiring the integration and synthesis of knowledge from many sources in the liberal arts tradition. The faculty support our mission through excellent teaching, scholarly activity, and service to the University, the local community, the State, and their management and accounting professions. Our students and graduates support our mission through active learning, research, and participation in service to the University, the State of North Carolina, and our local and global communities.
We strive to use our distinctive setting within a public liberal arts university to focus on the human element as part of the decision-making processes in organizations. Students are encouraged to develop an appreciation for diversity and inclusion, a strong orientation toward ethics and social responsibility, and an awareness of the importance of globalization as part of management and accounting disciplines. We capitalize on our small size to facilitate collaboration and intellectual interaction among students and faculty, and this active learning enables students to become effective leaders and contributors to both their professional and social environments.
Mission approved and updated September 5, 2017