For U. of Arkansas’s New Business Dean, It’s All About Logistics

Supply-Chain Specialist

The new dean of the business school at the University of Arkansas is believed to be one of the first leaders of a major business school drawn from the ranks of the supply-chain-management discipline.

A short trip north of the Fayetteville, Ark., campus, on Interstate 49, goes a long way toward explaining the choice. Within 25 miles are the headquarters of Tyson Foods, among the largest meat processors in the world; J.B. Hunt Transport Services, one of the largest trucking companies in North America; and Walmart, the largest retailer in the country. The university’s Sam M. Walton College of Business is named for the retail chain’s founder.

“For many companies around here, supply-chain management is one of the critical success factors of their businesses,” says Matthew A. Waller, who became dean in May.

The region provides a fertile laboratory for Mr. Waller, whose research has focused on retail supply-chain management — how retailers decide which items to stock, how much to stock, and how to get the items to their customers. He was so drawn to the region 22 years ago that he gave up a tenure-track position at Western Michigan University for a one-year appointment as a visiting professor at Arkansas.

Mr. Waller cites two reasons for the emergence of the discipline: deregulation of the trucking industry, in 1980, which gave companies more transportation options, and the technology boom of the 1990s, which made it easier to store and analyze large data sets.

The field’s growing importance among the region’s top companies — employers of many business-school graduates — led the college to establish a supply-chain-management department in 2011, with Mr. Waller as its first chair.

When the dean position opened, in 2015, he was initially reluctant to apply, concerned about his fund-raising ability and about the impact on his family. He first agreed to only a one-year appointment as interim dean, but soon realized that he liked the position after all.

Now Mr. Waller hopes to increase faculty pay and expand the Fleischer Scholars Program, which brings high-school students from underserved parts of Arkansas to the campus for summer training.

He also hopes to bring greater efficiency to what some might consider a challenge more daunting than even a global supply chain: the university bureaucracy.

On the advice of a colleague, Mr. Waller set up short meetings last year with about 70 administrators across the campus. He kept detailed notes and included in his notebook a photo of each person he met with.

“Within a university, decisions are made in a very networked kind of way,” he says. “By having that network, it allows me to really get things done more quickly.” — Ben Wieder

Endless Debt

As he prepared to retire this month, Paul C. Combe, longtime president and chief executive of American Student Assistance, says people often asked whether he would really be able to walk away from the issue of burdensome student debt.

“I don’t want to stop thinking about it,” he says. “It keeps me up, keeps me occupied.”

When Mr. Combe took the helm, 20 years ago, the private nonprofit organization functioned as a student-loan guarantor. Under his leadership, much of its focus has shifted from collecting on defaulted loans to helping parents and students understand student debt.

“As the cost of education has crept up, debt has crept up, and the point of need gets higher and higher,” he says. “The majority of people attending college right now need to apply for financial aid.”

Mr. Combe, who previously served as executive director of the Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority, and director of financial aid at Boston College, says that over the past 40 years, debt has become the way the country finances education: “The whole problem with student loans is that it is now the major source of financing.”

He says the question isn’t whether college is too expensive to attend, but when “do we start funding education at the state and the federal level more appropriately?”

Problems that lead to loan delinquency often stem from a lack of information, he notes, coupled with borrowers’ fear of contact with anyone who might help them, in part because the only people calling about their loans are collection agencies.

To help “education consumers” understand their debt before they default, the association started a free consumer-literacy program in 2012. The program, SALT, is aimed at providing resources including debt-management planning and consumer rights. Some 275 institutions are using the SALT program.

Mr. Combe’s successor, John Zurick, who was most recently the organization’s executive vice president and president of SALT, will work to broaden that audience.

“There is no neutrality in the college process. The federal government is the lender now; they have a stake,” Mr. Combe says. “The problem I am handing over is really the ability to build the brand that is the trusted neutral agent.” — Mary Bowerman

Memory and Design

When Miriam Gusevich, an associate professor of architecture and planning at the Catholic University of America, entered an open international architecture competition in Ukraine this spring, she felt a personal connection to the project.

The competition was for the design of a memorial at Babi Yar, the site of one of the deadliest massacres of the Holocaust. During World War II, members of Ms. Gusevich’s family were killed in a concentration camp in neighboring Poland.

“You’re contributing to a larger purpose,” she says about entering the competition. “I knew that it would be difficult emotionally.”

She and her team — Jay Kabriel, an assistant professor at Catholic University, and Peter Miles, an alumnus — won third prize in June for their design of a memorial park at Babi Yar, a ravine northwest of Kiev, where Nazi forces killed more than 33,000 Jews in two days in September 1941.

The design from Ms. Gusevich’s team imagines the site as a crime scene and visitors as detectives trying to piece together what happened there.

After World War II, Soviet authorities “tampered with this site to such an extent, they took out the Jewish cemetery, and they built a television station,” Ms. Gusevich says. “What they have done over the years with this site is really tampering with the evidence. We felt that in a sense we were being detectives by trying to understand what the site was like before the murders.”

No first-place winner was chosen for the competition; a team from Slovenia tied for second place with a team from France and Colombia.

Ms. Gusevich’s parents emigrated from Poland to Cuba as children in the 1930s. Her father left behind his parents and three sisters, who died in the Treblinka concentration camp.

She herself was a refugee from Cuba. Born and raised in Havana, she resettled in New York City in 1968 and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Cornell University.

Though her team’s design for Babi Yar will not be built, Ms. Gusevich says, “we’re just honored to be included among the best projects, and we have an opportunity to contribute to the conversation that the citizens are going to have about the site.”

The design competitions that she enters must meet three criteria, she says: involve a public space, integrate urban architecture and landscapes, and deal with the theme of memory.

Ms. Gusevich has worked on public projects in Chicago including the Jane Addams Memorial Park and the Cancer Survivors’ Garden in Maggie Daley Park.

With each project, she says, she wants to answer the question: “How does one honor the memory of a place and at the same time enable future generations to live with it so that it becomes a part of their lives?” — Arielle Martinez

3 Scientists Recognized

The three winners of this year’s 2016 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists are David Charbonneau, a professor of astronomy at Harvard University; Phil S. Baran, a professor of chemistry at Scripps Research Institute; and Michael Rape, a professor of cell and developmental biology at the University of California at Berkeley and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Mr. Charbonneau has discovered numerous exoplanets, including an Earth-like planet orbiting a nearby star. Mr. Baran has developed a way to help chemists efficiently and economically synthesize substances, among them one that may be used to treat skin cancer. Mr. Rape has made discoveries about the way cells communicate, knowledge that could lead to new treatments for cancer and other diseases.

Each will receive $250,000, which is believed to be the largest unrestricted cash award given to early-career scientists in the United States. The awards are given annually by the Blavatnik Family Foundation.— Ruth Hammond

Correction (7/18/2016, 1:48 p.m.): This article originally included one inconsistent reference to Paul C. Combe, the longtime president and chief executive of American Student Assistance, as “Mr. Waller” instead of “Mr. Combe.” The article has been updated to reflect this correction.

Correction (7/26/2016, 6:30 p.m.): This article originally said that Matthew A. Waller, the new business dean at the University of Arkansas, was believed to be the first dean of a major business school drawn from the ranks of supply-chain management. He is not the first, just one of the first. At least two business deans with supply-chain backgrounds started their jobs before he began his. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.

Read more about people in Gazette or on Twitter at @ruthehammond. Submit news releases and contributions for What I’m Reading to people@chronicle.com.