NEWS STORY - DECEMBER 2019

Loyola University Chicago’s business school was internationally recognized by the Financial Times for its commitment to ethics, social purpose and sustainability.

According to the special report published in October, the Financial Times reached out to “business schools around the world to share examples of their activities with societal impact.” There were four categories that schools could submit activities under: faculty research, teaching, student projects and building operations.

Out of the 220 institutions that entered, the Quinlan School of Business came out on top for best practices and was one of only four schools to make it into three of the categories. The other American university to receive this honor was the University of California at Berkeley.

“For decades,” wrote Dean Kevin Stevens on the business school’s website, “Quinlan has been at the forefront of providing business education based on a foundation of ethics.”

Stevens has led Quinlan’s efforts in promoting social responsibility ever since he was appointed dean in 2015. He helped recruit ethicists to modernize and moralize the school’s curriculum while relaunching the Baumhart Center for Social Enterprise and Responsibility, a hub on campus where students are taught how to combine business strategy and social purpose.

In the report, Loyola was recognized for producing over 80 publications about social responsibility in business, for its student-run consulting projects that focused on topics like non-profits and for the eco-friendly design of the business school’s home, Schreiber Center.

Schreiber Center was built with different sustainable building mechanics, such as natural ventilation and automatic blinds that close when it gets too hot.

According to the online Chicago data portal, Schreiber Center used 2.92 million kilo-British thermal units (KBTUs) of electricity and emitted less than 700 metric tons of greenhouse gas. High emissions of this gas contribute to global warming and climate change.

To put Schreiber’s sustainability initiatives into context, the Gabelli School of Business at Fordham University in New York, another Jesuit institution, is roughly the same size as Schreiber Center in terms of square footage. New York’s open data portal states their business school building used a staggering 8.44 million KBTUs of electricity and emitted 1,248 metric tons of greenhouse gas in 2017.

Although Quinlan is paving the way for greener university buildings, there’s still room for improvement to make Schreiber eco-friendlier. The city reports that it still used 3,312,416 KBTUs of natural gas in 2017, which isn’t renewable, and that contributes to air pollution.

Furthermore, last year Schreiber received a LEED Gold certification for its sustainability efforts, yet the highest ranking a building can earn from the U.S. Green Building Council is LEED Platinum. Other business schools beat out Schreiber that year. The Northwestern Kellogg School of Management’s Global Hub building was one, which received platinum status and is pledging to produce net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 using only geothermal energy.

Quinlan Professor Eve Geroulis, who is also the director of the school’s graduate marketing program, is excited that Loyola was acknowledged by the Financial Times and shared the report with all her classes. She says that she tries to implement socially responsible business ethics in her lectures by getting students to start thinking more critically and ask more questions.

“I think fundamentally we’ve gone so far from understanding the morals and ethics of business and we underestimate the role that business plays in society,” Geroulis said. “We’ve abandoned an ethical compass that needs to be instilled and resurrected in the next generation of business leaders. The only way to do that is to encourage and stoke [student] imaginations in a way that helps them ask important questions. If you don’t begin the journey on the right footing, you’ll get lost along the way.”

While Geroulis believes that Loyola is a unique place to receive an education because of the Jesuit values that the school was founded on, she thinks that professors can push students harder in classes so that the university is a more challenging and rewarding space in the future.

Loyola recently lost its coveted top 100 ranking on the “U.S. News Best Colleges” list, going from 89 last year to 104 this year. The university explained in an email to students earlier this year that the administration anticipated the drop and have vowed to "continue ongoing, mission-based work to positively impact student success, campus diversity, alumni engagement, and fundraising."

“What we should do better is engage students more diligently in terms of what we expect from them,” Geroulis said. “I think we’ve lowered the bar and that’s not just Loyola, it’s all schools. Grade inflation is a problem.”

However, at the end of the day, what keeps Geroulis waking up in the morning and coming to teach at Loyola are the social justice values infused in the curriculum.

“I’ll put my money on a Loyola graduate over an Ivy [League] graduate any day because I think Loyola students have more street smarts,” Geroulis said. “They have a willingness to work harder because nothing’s been handed to them.”