Jan 21, 2015

By Rumasa Noor

The College of Business and Economics (CoBE) at UW-Whitewater has been headed by several distinguished individuals in the college’s history. The trend continues with John Chenoweth, who was appointed as the dean of CoBE in Dec. 2014.
“It’s certainly an honor to be able to lead the college,” Chenoweth said.

Career at UW-W
Chenoweth has held several positions at UW-W since he came to the university in 2002. He started as a faculty member at the Department of Information Technology and Business Education, which is now known as Information Technology and Supply Chain Management, he said.
Chenoweth was named the chair of the same department in 2006, where he served as chair for five years before becoming the associate dean in 2011.
“It’s a school that certainly provides opportunities to faculty and others that are interested in taking on more and more leadership roles, and that’s welcoming,” Chenoweth said. “There are certainly some colleges out there that don’t do that.”

Future goals
With positive changes being made at the college, such as the addition of the doctoral program and the student enrollment constantly increasing, Chenoweth said he wants to continue the growth and success of CoBE. He also said he wants to focus on the needs of the college and discover how to meet those needs.
“One of the nice things about this role in this college is you know there aren’t any crisis points that need to get solved. I think one of the things we will be looking at is setting ambition for the next five to 10 years,” Chenoweth said. “The last time we formally went through that process was about 10 years ago and so obviously we are trying to do that in small ways, but we will probably go through a formal process of setting a vision for the next roughly 10 years.”

Chenoweth mentioned the Doctorate of Business Administration (DBA) program currently has 20 cohorts, and he plans on keeping it this way for the next three years.
One of his first responsibilities as he takes on his new role, is to fill certain leadership roles in the college, Chenoweth said.
“We have a leadership position as I move out of this role, we have some searches to backfill so that’s one of the key things that we’ll be doing over the next several months, we have also other associate deans retiring so we just have some leadership positions that we’ll need to fill at the college level,” Chenoweth said.
He said he appreciated the former interim dean Lois Smith for always being willing to take on responsibility and leadership roles. She has served as the interim dean twice for the CoBE. Chenoweth said she has the respect of everyone in college.
The interim roles aren’t always easy to serve, and she has been the “perfect” person to do that, he said.

Advice for students
Chenoweth also offered a piece of advice for existing and incoming students.
“I think one of the things that we take pride in is our faculty and student interactions, and certainly the applied nature of our program,” Chenoweth said. “I would just tell them [students] to get involved, find ways to interact with the faculty and our business partners outside of the classroom.