PricewaterhouseCoopers Brings Entrepreneurs, Activists, and Leaders to the Undergraduate College

CEOs, politicians, regulators, entrepreneurs, activists, artists, and writers, are coming to campus to speak to undergraduate students about business from their points of view. These lectures are a crucial component of Business & Its Publics, a required course for freshman.

This spring, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President, Water Keeper Alliance; Jim Maher, NY Metro PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Assurance Leader, PwC; and Thomas Krens Director, Guggenheim Foundation, were among the list of prominent speakers who continued their participation with the course. In addition, this semester’s course also included modules on “Corporate Social Responsibility,” featuring Mark Tercek, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs, and Niko Canner, Managing Director of Katzenback Partners; “Fraud and White Collar Crime,” featuring Walter Pavlo, Founder and President of Etika, LLC, and Timothy P. Hedley, Forensic Partner, KPMG; and “Leading Organizations,” featuring Jim Flanagan, US Financial Services Cross Line of Service Leader, PwC, and John Biggs, Former CEO, TIAA-CREF; and Adrian Wooldridge, Washington Bureau Chief for the Economist magazine, who lent a conservative voice to provide the students with a well-rounded view.

During the 2006-2007 academic year, Business and Its Publics was sponsored by PwC for the first of a three-year relationship that grew out of the firm’s support of the PwC Speaker Series. PwC’s support has enabled the course to develop in a number of key areas. According to Professor Douglas Guthrie, who leads the course with Dean Sally Blount-Lyon, “This year, we have added new speakers to an already stellar lineup, we have added new content, and, most importantly, we have begun to revamp the writing component of the course to bring it more in line with the business writing courses the students have in their sophomore, junior, and senior years at Stern.”

Brendan Dougher, PwC's New York Metro Markets Managing Partner, explains, "Supporting Business & Its Publics is a wonderful opportunity for PwC to encourage NYU's undergraduates to engage important business issues and to experience many perspectives. We are happy to be working with the University on this important initiative."

The goal of Business & Its Publics is to introduce students to the many interconnections between business, society, markets, politics, art, culture, and life. Small plenary sessions complement the lectures, giving students the opportunity to reflect verbally and through writing assignments. “This course is pushing undergraduate business education in new directions,” says Professor Guthrie, “It is forcing impressionable freshmen to think deeply and critically about the role of business in society, the various ways that businesses of all sorts shape the world in which we live, and the roles they might play in pushing the companies where they will work to think responsibly about these issues.”