84: Stowe Shoemaker (UNLV) on Hospitality Programs

Dave Ikenberry 0:13 Welcome to Dean's Council, a podcast aimed at supporting university leaders holding one of the more critical jobs on a university campus. Your panelists, Ken Kring, Jim Ellis and davinberry, engage in conversation with highly accomplished deans and other academic leaders regarding the ever complex array of challenges that Deans face in one of the loneliest and most unique jobs in the academy today, we take a slightly different tact with our show, we interview a true veteran in hospitality education by nature, hospitality programs have a heavy dose of business curriculum embedded in them, and various universities attack that problem in different ways.

Some create hospitality departments within the business school. Others feel hospitality, with its unique characteristics, are better served as a standalone College. Our guest today, Stowe Shoemaker, sheds light on this issue and helps us understand the subtleties involved in this question. Stowe is a distinguished hospitality academic who served as dean of the hospitality college at UNLV from 2013 to 2023 where he drove remarkable curricular reform.

Prior to that, he held roles at the University of Houston's Hilton College of Hotel Administration and then University of Texas's MD Anderson program. Stowe shares with us what he feels is critical for students of hospitality to understand in areas of consumer behavior, revenue management, pricing strategies and customer loyalty, while these are all topics taught in business school, Stowe was fundamental in driving his passion for sharing these same ideas, but with a hospitality focus in the conversation which follows, I believe you'll find quite a bit to learn from Stowe in hospitality programs and how they work and how that can better inform us as business school leaders.

More importantly, we can see the parallels sto raises between his experiences and the challenges we face in our roles as business school deans or business school administrators, for example, how do we leverage advisory boards or drive philanthropy as a force for change? Stowe shares with us a very interesting insight into what to expect as you transition out of your role into your new non Dean life. Ken Kring 2:40 We're here today with Stowe Shoemaker still recently was spent 10 years as dean of the William F Carroll College of Hospitality at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, among the top schools with hospitality in the world.

He also previously spent eight years as the Associate Dean for Research. At the University of Houston. So we're really curious still, perhaps to begin just to give us somewhat of a perspective on how the hospitality education has evolved, and more interestingly, where you think it might be going. Stowe Shoemaker 3:24 Thank you very much.

It's really an honor to be speaking with you all today in hospitality education, it's going through a metamorphosis. Really. For years, hospitality was really just focusing on the culinary side, restaurants, hotel operations, and over time, it's really evolved into, really be business schools with hospitality examples. The leader in this really was Cornell University.

Cornell was really the first hospitality school. Then eventually they became very much a business school with hospitality examples. And other schools followed suit. Michigan State really one of the first hospitality schools did the same University of Denver, etc.

And so it's really involved. And what happening now is, as programs start looking at hospitality, they basically put them into business schools or other colleges. And I think the reason for that is, is, if you look at kind of the curriculum that hospitality, many hospitality schools have involved into it's teaching marketing, it's teaching accounting, it's teaching finance, and I think for upper administrations, they say, well, you're all teaching the same thing. Why do we need two different deans?

Let's merge the schools. We'll save a lot of money when I became dean at UNLV. In fact, really the reason I became the Dean was because I saw this trend and I felt it was really doing a disservice to the hospitality industry. Because.

It's really, if you go to a sort of a non hospitality school, you really don't get immersed into what hospitality means in terms of, you're always surrounded by people. It's always on the go. And so if you're taking a traditional, tradition curriculum, and then you go into hospitality, you're like, Oh, my God, I never thought it was going to work this hard, and then you lead the industry, and so you do a disservice to students. So I know I'm going on, but I really wanted to say, in hospitality, let's double down on hospitality education, prepare students, let them know what kind of career they're getting into, and not become a business school.

And that's the strategy I took at UNLV. It's a long winded answer, Dave Ikenberry 5:45 so to say this slightly differently, so essentially, what you're saying there's two governance structures I've seen. One is you're an embedded self identified department inside of a B School, and the other is your standalone college. And what you're saying is you're for the standalone College.

Is that right? That is correct, that is correct. And so you've talked about the student side of it. But what about the is there conflict with or envy, or what have you between the B School and the hospitality school.

Or, I suppose, you deal with the cost structure issues by not replicating marketing. 101 you just send them to the marketing 101, course in the B School and and then you teach an upper level course about applied marketing and hospitality. Stowe Shoemaker 6:44 So it's a great question. First, let me address the first issue of kind of jealousies between hospitality schools that are standalone and business schools.

There is a fair amount of angst because hospitality schools tend to be very well known. And when I was at Cornell doing my PhD, you know, I would travel places, and I would say, Oh, I'm at Cornell. And they'd say, Oh, are you in the hospitality school? And many faculty around Cornell had the same question.

So you could be a world famous scientist, and they would never have heard of you particularly but they've heard of the hospitality school. Same thing happened to University of Houston and even to a sense at UNLV. So there's always this rivalry of you're so well known, but we're the true academics on the business school, because hospitality programs don't have the AACSB accreditation, which really adds a lot of rigor and standards to a program. But in terms of the curriculum in a standalone program, we tend to teach similar courses as in the business school, but we teach it with a real focus on hospitality.

So where we're teaching finance and accounting, all our examples come from the hospitality industry. When we're teaching marketing, it's much more from a service marketing approach and but what happens is, as faculty, as we become trained in a discipline, we become disciplined in marketing, I think we there's a tendency to end up teaching a traditional marketing class. So a marketing in a business school is similar to a marketing in the hospitality which is why there's this trend to say we could just make a bigger class, save resources, right?

And because hospitality enrollments are falling in education, there is that more tendency to become very much into a business school or another school. And want to add to that, because I think, as a dean, it's very critical that you sort of understand one where the future lays. And then how do you drive your school towards that future? And so for me, as the dean at UNLV, I saw this trend of moving to a business school, and I looked at the the political situation in Nevada, which were no no tax state.

We have a lot of universities for such a small state, and I could see the trend being, wait a minute, let's see how we can cut costs. Let's just merge the business school into the hotel school. And as the dean, I didn't want that to happen. And so what I really had to do was to say, Okay, let's really focus on an industry which is hospitality, and let's own that industry.

And the example that I I met a gentleman on an airplane once, and I said, Oh, what kind of what do you do for your business? And he says, Oh, I'm in the typewriter business. And I kind of gave a snarky remark, oh, that's a great. Business.

And he goes, Well, actually, you can be the leader in the dying industry. And he works for Olympia typewriters. And he said, think if you look at the world, how many places really have reliable electricity, but how many people need documents? And as other people exited the industry because computers took over.

We became the leader. And I thought, Wow, that's a great strategy for UNLV. Yes, hospitality enrollment is declining, but there are still people who want to study hospitality, so let's be the leader in that industry. And so I really went on the limb and said, This is a strategy we're going to follow, and time will tell whether it's successful or not.

Ken Kring 10:49 There's sort of a interesting refinement on the value proposition of management education that hospitality kind of pinpoints and wonder, if you might elaborate on that the proximity to the customer and the importance of getting everything right is a much less theoretical and much more applied reality. Wonder what the implications are in terms of curriculum development, faculty engagement and flexibility, interdisciplinary kinds of demands or imperatives. Wonder if you could just unpack that a little for us.

Yeah. So I Stowe Shoemaker 11:33 think when I was a dean, I really focused on at the end of the day at UNLV, we're changing kids lives. We're taking kids who are very bright but maybe not have to find their resources or the background to really study at an Ivy League school, and their parents probably work in the industry, and so they grew up in Nevada and and so our goal was to say, Okay, how do we change these kids lives through education? And what I realized was that in students, really, what I've learned over my years is teaching as kids think they they want to get into a career, and so they they don't probably know a lot about that career, but they think it sounds fun, and that's certainly true in hospitality.

They watched a wedding planner, and they go, I want to be a wedding planner. And so then they go study hospitality, and then when they graduate and they realize how hard it is, they go, Oh, my God. So what we really tried to do at UN other is to say, let's create a curriculum that gives students a lot of understanding of the industry, what it means to be close to the customer, right? So let's create internships.

Let's create a curriculum where we certainly teach all the basics, but we also have a curriculum where we can create concentrations, where we bring in non traditional faculty to teach those concentrations, people who are working in the industry who can really give them an insight into what it's all about. And how do we have mentorships and again, going back to internships, so that students are very immersed in what it means to be in hospitality, so that by the time they graduate, they know what they're getting into.

And I think the biggest disservice we do in education is teach kids all this theoretical stuff, and then we send them out to an industry and they go, Oh my God, I didn't know the industry was really like this. And then they changed their career, and they've spent a lot of money getting an education that may or may not be as valuable to them as it should have been. And so I felt that my role as the dean was to say these students have made a choice to choose UNLV or to choose my college, and we have an obligation to make sure that we're setting them up for a path for long term success.

We don't want them to graduate and go, Oh my God. I had no idea this was the industry, and then they got to start again. And so as I looked at hiring faculty, as I looked at putting together curriculum, you know, in conjunction with the faculty, it was all about, how do we create an environment that really prepares kids for what it means to deal with customers on a daily basis? Dave Ikenberry 14:39 So you mentioned earlier about falling enrollments.

Have you looked under the hood as to what's driving that phenomena? Is it just the enrollment cliff and high school graduates? Is it more to the story? Is there more to the story in the hospitality space?

And also, what are you doing about it? Yeah. Big question. Stowe Shoemaker 15:01 So it certainly there's a couple issues.

One certainly is the the decline in just enrollments going to students right the that cliff that you just mentioned. That's certainly one thing. I think a second issue is that, as hospitality, schools have become merged into other programs. Parents are saying, Why look at a traditional hospitality school?

They still get a business degree, like I know my parents. When I was looking at college, my mom said, just go to a business school, because at the end of the day, hospitality is a business. So you'll just learn what you need to learn. And so I did not go to specific school, so I think that's one issue.

I think the second issue is, is that we haven't really, we haven't really defined truly what hospitality is in the sense that we think of it as just sort of working at the front desk in a hotel. But I recently put together a whole sort of strategy for where I thought a hospitality school should go. And I think the issue is we have to really look at hospitality and say, Wait a minute. We are.

We're obviously in the experience business. But if we look at all the things that relate to hospitality, you have supply chain, but you have the experience, you have the arts and sciences, you have when you look at architecture and design and layout and how we set up a space to create an environment that's hospitality, how we deal with crowd control, that's hospitality. So by creating a more broad understanding of what hospitality is. We move away from just being teaching marketing and accounting, but we teach experience design.

We teach how the beverages create a better experience. How do you use revenue management to drive profitability? All of that becomes really defining hospitality, and it's not just a business, but it's multifaceted. And I think if we can create that message as in hospitality, then all sudden, parents are going, Wait a minute, there's a lot to the hospitality industry that I think my son or daughter can learn by going to a hospitality school if the curriculum is designed in that way.

And I'll be frank, we haven't gotten to that point yet. You look at, I just did some work looking at a bunch of different schools, some independent hospitality schools, some where the hospitality program was in the business school, and it's all very similar. And so I think that's one of the reasons, is that there's not a there hasn't been that real differentiation yet. We started to do that at UNLV.

Then I left my Dean's role, and I believe it's going to be continuing as they start adding other areas. Ken Kring 17:58 There's always a lot of conversation about collaboration. It's easy to talk about and it's hard to do, but one of the things that you're flagging is the real imperative for collaboration around everything from robotics and engineering to AI to theater and liberal arts and a hospitality education. So how does that what are the challenges and where's the opportunity?

Stowe Shoemaker 18:28 So I think the opportunity is that, yes, all of those things you just mentioned are wide open for a university. I think the challenges are, is that as deans, you have to be at a place where you have a great relationship with other deans. You have to deal with faculty in the sense of faculty curriculum, in the sense of, maybe we don't need course a in order to take course b. So what happens is, if you try to create a relationship with creating sort of experience design classes where you're working with fine arts, there tends to be this belief, well, you can't take this course unless you've had course A, and in order to course A, you have to have course C.

And so what happens then is, you end up it becomes almost impossible to create a curriculum within 120 credits. So the challenge is, is to say, let's think differently. And how do we design a course that you don't need a course a in order to get a lot out of course b, so someone from another college could take course b, and I think, I think that's the future of education, because, as because of this enrollment cliff, not only is hospitality losing enrollment, but other colleges are losing enrollment, and so this becomes a way that I'm preparing my son or daughter for, really, careers that are opening up.

Mm. Yeah, and I think it's a challenge, and there's also the question of funding, right? And where do we fire the hire the faculty? I think my understanding with a CSB accreditation is you're required to have X number of faculty who have earned their PhD from an AC accredited school, and because of that rule, you become sort of limited in terms of the type of faculty you can actually hire.

And what I tried to do at UNLV and not tried to do what I did is because we were facing limited resources, I was able to bring in industry experts who are not tenure track to come in and teach one or two classes around a specific topic. And that always runs into kind of the politics of they're not tenure track. That's a problem. That's administration getting away from long term faculty that becomes a real challenge is, how do we convince other schools to say, hey, all right, can you bring in some industry experts, or do you have faculty who are willing to design a class for a certain population, like hospitality students, and at UNLV that was working, we were able to create some great courses with the School of Fine Arts.

An example, we created wine and music period right when you go to a bar, how do you have the right kind of music or in a wine bar, which are becoming popular? So we had someone in fine arts who really was an expert in music and musical theory, and he designed a class in conjunction with one of our faculty, who was an expert in wine, and talked about how all that came together to create a great experience. We did another class where we our students ran the food and beverage for a dinner theater, and then the fine arts theater students actually wrote a play around that we contribute, we work together.

Design, okay, what kind of menu would go with this kind of theme for this party, and then we put it all together, and then soiled it out for like, a week. So those kinds of things worked very well. But, you know, it took three or four years to convince people that was a good idea. Because the dean said we should do this, and I just thought it was automatically happen, but it took a long time to kind of work to the barriers that I mentioned.

Dave Ikenberry 22:32 So kind of extending this theme of introducing innovation into the college. You've talked a little bit about how you did that, but I would imagine that you have an advisory board, and you listen, you leaned on them pretty carefully. Is that true? And how did you utilize and where did you utilize that expertise to drive change?

Stowe Shoemaker 22:58 So that's a great question. So when one of the things I did was, when I became Dean, we had a very standard, traditional curriculum that you find in education, in that it was very rigorous. We had 80 credits that were pretty much fixed, that every student had to take. So everybody went lock step through and I realized that was not the future.

So the question became, how do I change the curriculum, and how do I get buy in to change the curriculum when, let's face it, as faculty, we like what we teach. We know why we teach it. We believe it's important, and so getting everyone to say, this is a good idea to change. And I realized that it needed to be more than just my advisory board.

And so what I did is we put on event called hospitality 2025 and we brought in a kind of a well known speaker, Michael Horn, who's done a lot in curriculum and education, and we invited my advisory board members. We invited industry people in from around the country, from some of the major hotel companies and restaurant companies, and we spent a day really looking at where was the future of hospitality, what were the needs that people needed to see, what was the skill sets? I had a couple faculty do research on kind of understanding skill sets needed, and then I worked very closely with the consultant and put together a faculty group, and then my advisory board came in and really helped guide this discussion.

But where the biggest asset to my advisory board is that all the things I wanted to do cost money, and I work in the state that doesn't just give money automatically because someone has an idea. And so what my advisory board was very critical in helping. Find resources to basically fund the initiatives I wanted to do. So I really, I believe that one of the futures was, really, how do we understand fast casual segment?

And so I work, one of my advisory board members is the founder of the panda Restaurant Group, a co founder with his wife, and they run Panda Express, and so I worked very closely with Andrew and his team, and they basically then funded a program to bring in fast casual I, one of my advisory board members, also helped me generate a $6 million gift. Another one helped me introduce to generate a $5 million gift, all which I could use for program development. So I really relied on my advisory board to help introduce me to people who could understand the vision of where I wanted to take.

The School saw how the vision helped themselves or helped their businesses, and they were willing to support it, and I used my advisory board as to help me deal with frustrations, right? I think before we're deans, we're essentially independent contractors, right? We come in, we teach our class, we do all the things we want to do. We just want to be left alone.

We become a dean, and suddenly we're a middle manager because we have faculty who basically can say yes or no, and we have really no power over them, but then we also have our provost that we have to respond report to. And so learning how to deal as a middle manager was I used my advisory board to help me deal with either personnel issues, strategy issues, for dealing with people above me or people below me or people at the same level, and they helped me really address issues that I was dealing with, much more than curriculum issues, if that makes sense, Ken Kring 27:04 yeah, it does.

You know, you have the distinct experience, and we're eager for our listeners to to learn from it. Of having been a successful Dean for 10 years, one of the insights you've shared with me and conversations previously is sort of around the transfer of institutional knowledge. You put a lot of change and a lot of building into a continuity. Be interested to hear just your reflections on what have you left behind and how has that?

How have you thought about that transfer of institutional knowledge as part of your legacy. Stowe Shoemaker 27:45 I think one of the lessons that has been very impacted for me as to transfer from being a dean to being a non Dean is that in terms of the transfer of knowledge, no one really cares. And there was really shock to me, because I spent a lot of time developing things and had a lot of relationships, and once I wasn't the Dean anymore, no one came to me for advice on what do you think about this?

What do you think about that? Tell me about these relationships. And I really struggled with that, because I was thinking, well, that's crazy. But then I I talked to a dear friend of mine who was president of the RAND Corporation, and he said, so this happens all the time in industry.

It happens in government, where a new team comes in and they just start from scratch, and you shouldn't feel bad about it. And I talked to my aunt, who was very big in theater in New York City, had a casting agency and was very involved in theater, and she said, So in theater, we have a saying that said we'd love you, but the play's over, you shouldn't take it personally. And what I realized is that that's true, is that. And I realized I the way I'd kind of deal with that is I had the keys for 10 years, I did the best I could in those 10 years, and now it's time for someone else, and I had to really separate my ego from I have all this background.

I know all this stuff. You should come see me to realizing that other people have ideas, and they are coming in with their ideas, and they should be allowed to do it just the way that I did. Now, I spent a lot of time talking to the prior Deans as I took the university forward. So I was surprised that no one was really talking to me, but that's just the way life is.

And I think I spent a long time kind of dealing with this, like, you know what's wrong? And I realized it's just that's just the way, kind of. Life is, I think, is that former dean, you have to say is, what are the lessons you learned? What are the things you could have done differently if you were a dean?

Again, those are good things to take forward. But on the other hand, you also have to say, I did what I could, and I did the best I could, and none of us are ever going to be 100% perfect, and I think if we don't realize the mistakes we made, then we don't grow as individuals. And so I spent a lot of time really thinking about the plays over but we love you, and that really helped me a lot. Over time, they have started talking to me, so it's not like I'm totally left in Yeah, good.

Dave Ikenberry 30:39 So that's just an amazing message when I reflect on my own leadership roles and moving from one to the next, I too, experienced that they same thing. Why is my phone not ringing? And there must be this powerful human behavioral element of trying to make your own mark. So thank you for capturing that, because I think there must be 1000s and 1000s of people who are gonna learn something from that message that's just that's really powerful.

Thanks for sharing. Ken Kring 31:11 Wait though, thank you so much. We'll have to have you back. This show is over for now, but, Dave Ikenberry 31:21 yeah, we loved you, but the show's over.

Dave Ikenberry 31:31 Ken, that was a really enjoyable discussion. What were your observations? Ken Kring 31:36 Yeah, I thought he's a wonderful human being, yeah? And so you just had access to the person who's had really incredible experience.

I mean, he was a absolute change agent in an institution that was and is, you know, top in the field. You know, it was some of the personal observations that we all experience, but can't put our finger on that. I think we're really quite enlightening. Ken Kring 32:07 What was your takeaway, Dave, Dave Ikenberry 32:09 I learned a lot about hospitality schools.

There is some overlap with business, and I know that there can be tension either with a hospitality school inside of a B school, or tension across two colleges, one in hospitality and one in business. And I appreciated him sharing his perspective on on it. I think he's right. It may be a little bit of an expense burden, but I think separating the two colleges probably is the right way to go.

The other thing I really enjoyed were those last three to five minutes talking about general leadership issues, particularly this whole idea of the the show is over, and it's human nature for the next leader to chart their own course. Final observation that I really enjoyed was how he leveraged advice from external players, whether they were corporate leaders or his board, to drive change in the college and you know, I think in hospitality, I suspect that's a curriculum that really needs to stay on its game to be relevant.

So it was interesting how he did that. Ken Kring 33:36 Yeah, there's a really fine point on hospitality as a customer and consumer oriented right? And the need to be absolutely in tune with who's who's purchasing Senior Services. And how do we, how do we keep that refinement focused on the end use that takes kind of mindset, not just skill set, but a kind of mindset and disposition that he definitely represented.

Dave Ikenberry 34:03 Yeah, it was a really, it was a fun episode. Ken Kring 34:07 Yeah, great. Dave Ikenberry 34:08 Thank you for listening to this episode of Dean's Council. This show is supported in part by Korn Ferry leaders in executive search.

Dean's Council was produced in Boulder, Colorado by Joel Davis of analog digital arts for a catalog of previous shows, please visit our website@deanscouncil.com if you have any feedback for us, please let us know by sending an email to feedback@deanscouncil.com and finally, please hit follow or subscribe on Your favorite podcast player so that you can automatically receive our latest show you. Transcribed by https://otter.