Representatives of the Fordham University community traveled to China to celebrate the 10th anniversary of BiMBA, the first Chinese state-approved joint international MBA program, which has granted degrees to more than 4,000 students from China and abroad.
Stephen Freedman, Ph.D., senior vice president and chief academic officer, Howard Tuckman, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA), and Ilhan Akbil, GBA associate dean for corporate programs, joined in acknowledging the success of the BiMBA program, as well as those who were instrumental in its development, in a celebration on May 6 in Beijing.
“I’m delighted to celebrate this anniversary, an acknowledgment that BiMBA has become a mature and highly regarded academic program,” Freedman said. “Increasingly, a rigorous business education is an international business education. This program is in many ways a model for business programs in the 21st century. I’m very proud of Fordham’s involvement in such a successful international program.”
BiMBA, an English-language program, has been jointly sponsored by Peking University’s China Center for Economic Research and a consortium of U.S. Jesuit schools, and its faculty is drawn from those schools. BiMBA is accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.
The May 6 event was hosted by Justin Lin Yifu, Ph.D., founding director of the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University, and Dayuan Hu, Ph.D., China dean of BiMBA. Freedman presented Lin with a Steuben glass eagle on behalf of Fordham to honor Lin’s work at BiMBA and his recent appointment as chief economist and senior vice president for development economics at the World Bank. Lin is the first Asian to be appointed to the post, which he assumes May 31.
At the ceremony, Hu spoke about the history of BiMBA; Lin spoke about economic development and the importance of BiMBA as an institution. Also recognized at the ceremony were Ron Anton, S.J., Ph.D., the first U.S. dean of BiMBA; John Yang, Ph.D., the program’s current dean; and Ernest Scalberg, Ph.D., who was dean of GBA at the program’s inception.
On May 7, Freedman and Akbil joined twenty business leaders at a banquet to celebrate Lin’s World Bank appointment, and to pay tribute to his previous achievements.
