The School of Business Administration has been awarded a $1.4 million grant to provide MBA level courses for the Department of Defense's non-military senior managers..

The grant comes from Science Applications International Corp., a DOD contractor specializing in education and research activities, to fund the design, development and delivery of five two-week courses. The five courses are to be taught twice by the end of next year. Students who pass the course will be awarded graduate credit from UConn's business school that can be applied toward an MBA at UConn or transferred to a graduate program elsewhere.

"We are focusing on the non-military senior managers identified as the movers and shakers within the DOD," says Richard Dino, associate dean of the business school and the grant's principal investigator.

A year and a half ago, the DOD developed the Defense Leadership and Management Program to give non-military senior executive managers an opportunity to develop their careers and their decision-making skills. As part of the program, each manager is required to work for a year in a different department than their own, within the DOD, take a minimum of three months of military education and take a minimum of 10 graduate level courses to develop familiarity with the range of issues facing defense leaders..

"Just as corporations groom executives," Dino says, "the military wants to be able to give their civilian executives the opportunity to strengthen areas of expertise so they can be more valuable to the DOD, while at the same time prepared to assume a position of increased responsibility when that time arrives.".

The management program was also designed to provide a sense of a shared understanding and mission between the non-military and military components of the DOD.

The business school will be responsible for developing one part of the graduate level curriculum: the quantitative tools segment, which will focus on analytical skills. The courses' academic content will be consistent with the standards of the International Association for Management Education, formerly the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business.

Six faculty members, four from the school of business and two from the school of education, will teach statistics for managers, regression analysis, operations research and analytic models, program evaluation and defense resources management.

"It's exciting," says Ed Iwanicki, a professor of educational leadership who will teach program evaluation. "The cross-departmental collaboration by both schools will certainly benefit those at the DOD who enroll."

Luis Mocete