There’s a new face on the third floor of Schewel Hall: Dr. Nancy Hubbard, dean of the College of Business. Dr. Hubbard came to Lynchburg from Goucher College, in Towson, Maryland, where she was director of the Center for Education, Business and Professional Studies. She had been at Goucher, in various capacities, since 2012.
“We are delighted that Dr. Hubbard is dean of the College of Business,” Dr. Sally Selden, Lynchburg’s provost, said. “Her outstanding faculty credentials, her strong record of leadership, and her industry experiences all are attributes which will serve the college and our university well.
“I’m confident she will lead the College of Business with energy, wise judgment, and vision. Her commitment to creating programs that build synergies across the liberal arts and business will create exciting new opportunities for our students.”
Dr. Hubbard heard about the job opening at University of Lynchburg from a friend who told her, “It sounds like it’s up your alley.” She applied for the job and was on campus in April for an interview. Recalling her first visit to Lynchburg, she said, “It was lovely. The campus is really nice. Everyone I met was delightful and very welcoming. Very friendly and relaxed and good at what they do, but still relaxed, which is a great combination. Just very, very welcoming.”
She’s been on campus for about two weeks now. “I am loving my time here so far,” she said. “Everyone has been so welcoming. There are also so many opportunities, both internally and externally, at University of Lynchburg. I’m really quite excited.”
Dr. Hubbard was born in Chicago and raised in the Baltimore area, where she grew up swimming for the Baltimore Aquatic Club, later made famous by Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps. She swam competitively throughout her childhood and at Georgetown University, where she also earned bachelor’s degrees in marketing and international management.
An admirer of 1830s romanticist painter Eugene Delacroix, Dr. Hubbard had wanted to double major in business and art history at college. She said it was an “odd combination” but her “first choice of jobs was to run an art museum.” Because the two programs were housed in different schools at Georgetown, however, she settled for a minor in art history.
Asked about her plans for the College of Business, Dr. Hubbard said she wants to “put it more on the map” by highlighting people from the department, increasing recruitment efforts, collaborating with the University’s other four colleges, and cultivating relationships with businesses within a 100-mile radius.
“I really want to work closely with admissions to work on recruitment into the business school,” she said. “I want to work with the other colleges on multidisciplinary offerings, where business is a part of it, and be sure we are the first and natural choice for any businesses in the area in terms of training or graduate degrees or partnering.”
One of the multidisciplinary offerings Dr. Hubbard wants to develop is what she described as a “track for nonprofit management for performing artists — parlaying the relationship of having a business college in a liberal arts environment, because it’s still fairly unusual to have a business school that’s this closely linked to a liberal arts institution.
“I’d like to break down some silos that naturally develop from the way universities are organized, but students really don’t learn in silos. They like holistic learning. So the idea would be to see where business will fit in a holistic environment.”
She added that these kinds of changes are born from “really listening to students and what they want. They get really frustrated by silos. The world, to them, isn’t a silo. It’s multifaceted. I’d like to push some of the ideas even further and try some really creative things that we can do. I would like to try to be innovative and work on their high-impact experiences, and study-abroad and study-away programs, to try to really enhance the student experience.”
Over the past 30 years, Dr. Hubbard has worked or consulted with educational institutions and companies in more than 20 countries — “On every continent but Antarctica,” she said. She also studied, worked, and lived in the United Kingdom for many years, and is on the international faculties of Aix-Marseille Université in France and the Moscow School of Management, SKOLKOVO, in Russia.
Asked if these experiences have inspired any new study-abroad experiences for Lynchburg, Dr. Hubbard said, “Absolutely,” and that she was already in talks with universities in Africa, Europe, and South America. “I took a group of [Goucher] students to Mauritius this past January,” she said. “[We spent] three weeks there in the African Leadership University. It’s safe to say they had a life-changing experience.”
More about Dr. Hubbard:
In college, Dr. Hubbard was a sports photographer and had the opportunity to shoot the NCAA Final Four basketball tournament three of her four years at Georgetown. “I love college basketball,” she said, adding that one of her college classmates was Pat Ewing, current basketball coach for the Hoyas.
She is a seven-time World and European masters swimming champion. These days, however, she’s more involved in cycling.
While living in London, Dr. Hubbard spent a year as a producer for Trans World Sport television network. “It was the most fun job I ever had,” she said. “They needed a U.S. sports expert, somebody who knew the difference between baseball and cricket.”
Dr. Hubbard was the Faculty Athletic Representative at Goucher and is currently one of three FARs representing all NCAA DIII institutions. At Lynchburg, she will share FAR duties with Dr. Adam Dean, a member of the history faculty. “I really wanted to continue with that kind of role [here],” she said.
Dr. Hubbard is married to John Mann, who oversees Walraven, an industrial products company. They have five children between them, all of whom are either in college or out on their own. They also have an 11-year-old beagle/coonhound/terrier mix named Cassis.
Dr. Hubbard has a Wikipedia page.
