William C. Goolsby

Dean Turns Around UALR’s College of Business Administration

In the five years before William C. Goolsby became its dean, student credit hours at College of Business Administration at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock had declined by 25 percent.

“We were not treating our students as clients,” Goolsby says, “and we were not, in many cases, treating them as adults and responsible individuals,” even though the average age was 27.

In 1996, Goolsby was hired away from his position as chair of the Department of Finance at Washington State University in order to revitalize the CBA,which has an annual budget of $10 million.

In that time, the college has regained 19 percent of its student credit hours and exceeded each of its annual fund raising goals.

Goolsby has also established an executive MBA program and taken it on the road through partnerships with the University of Arkansas at Monticello, Southern Arkansas University and Arkansas Tech University.

The college’s new direction resulted in what Goolsby considers his greatest accomplishment: winning a $13.3 million grant from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation to build the Donald W. Reynolds Center for Business and Economic Development. The center will consolidate all of the College of Business Administration’s programs in one location.

Goolsby says there has been “resistance to most of the changes we’ve made, but I think that initial resistance … has mostly gone by the wayside.” The CBA, he says, “has a lot of committed people who wanted to make things better, and with their help, we’ve done that.”

Goolsby doesn’t want to claim all the credit for the college’s turnaround. Hiring him was proof, he says, that the UALR administration was ready to address the existing problems.

Goolsby is also a member of the District Export Council, the board of directors of Junior Achievement, a Rotarian, and pledge chairman of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Little Rock.

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