‘Hail and farewell’ to notable retirees

Suzanne Bergmeister, who retires August 31 as executive director of the Gilliam Center for Entrepreneurship (GCFE), says the choice to step away has been an especially hard one – one made all the more difficult by the strength of her attachment to JMU and the GCFE, which she has seen take deep root and grow in the nearly four years since she arrived from the University of Louisville.

However, for personal reasons, including the very recent birth of her first grandchild, Bergmeister has reached the decision to hand off the GCFE to the strong, dedicated team she has built, and to the center’s engaged, enthusiastic board of directors.

Bergmeister describes the GCFE that awaited her when she arrived from Louisville in July 2021 as a "blank slate."

It was just then emerging from the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the leadership position had gone unfilled for a period of time. This allowed Bergmeister, who had been at Louisville for 15 years in the role of entrepreneur-in-residence and assistant director of the entrepreneurship center, to craft a strategic plan for the GCFE almost from scratch.

The process included the formulation of a set of strategic priorities that would serve as the guide for future decision-making. Among these key operating principles were “Increase Student Engagement,” “Strengthen Community Connection,” and “Grow Venture Success.”

"If a proposed event or activity wasn't going to hit at least one – if not several – of the strategic priorities," she says, "we wouldn't do it."

Her vision for the resurgent GCFE was to spread an entrepreneurial mindset across the JMU campus and, indeed, the entire Shenandoah Valley. "I believe we've done that," Bergmeister says.

An observation she has made is that today's students are much more concerned with having a social impact than those she used to encounter in her Louisville days. It is to this she attributes the enthusiastic reception given, for example, to the Hisaoka-Pahlevani Social Impact Challenge, which serves as the culmination of the MGT310 course ("Business Fundamentals for Entrepreneurs") she teaches.

The course is mandatory for those who have declared an entrepreneurship minor but is closed to College of Business majors. The resulting mix of students runs the gamut from history and political science majors to aspiring engineers and dancers.

"We give them a real-world entrepreneurial experience," Bergmeister says. "They must design, manufacture and market JMU-themed merchandise, then choose a local non-profit to which they donate the proceeds."

The class also requires students to research their non-profits and project the impact their donations are likely to have. In the three semesters Suzanne has taught the class, more than $55,000 has been raised for local non-profits, with the current semester's results yet to be tallied.

"If you want to change the world, entrepreneurship is the way to do it," she says.

Reflecting on her 23 years of distinguished service to JMU, Molly Brown says the accomplishment of which she is most proud is the success she has had working with students “who would otherwise not have been able to attend JMU.”

Brown, associate dean for undergraduate programs in the College of Business, has announced her decision to retire effective August 1.

The position she is preparing to relinquish is one “that needs to be taken seriously,” she says, consistent with the “life-changing” importance of a student's decision to seek admission to the College of Business. “It sets them on a path," Brown explains.

One of the things that has been so fulfilling about her role as an associate dean, she says, "is that I feel I've made a real difference in people's lives." With the ability to bring about change, however, has come a similar measure of responsibility. Not infrequently she has found herself riding to the rescue of young adults mired in some sort of distress. But no matter whether a student is facing a development as adverse as academic suspension, or one as auspicious as induction into an honor society, "they all have a place here,” she says.

Brown dates her full-time employment at JMU to the fall of 2002, when she accepted a job as an instructor in the School of Accounting.

After serving as an adjunct faculty member for several semesters, she discovered that it brought her joy simply to teach accounting. "And especially," she says, "finding those for whom accounting was their thing — except they didn't know it until they got to that first class."

Brown hearkens back to the time she served as the regional coordinator for Beta Alpha Psi, the honor society for the accounting profession. "I got a different sort of feeling visiting those other schools," she says. "There wasn't the kind of happiness that I see in the students here at JMU."

That difference, says Brown, is what has made it so easy for her to recruit for JMU.

"It would have been a very different job,” she says, to try to attract students to a school in which she didn't have a strong belief. “But I really believe in the experience students have for their undergraduate education here at JMU."

“JMU gets the big thing right,” says Scott Gallagher, who has announced that on September 1 he will retire from the university.

"It gets the big thing right in that it sincerely and legitimately cares about undergraduate education,” he continues. “Almost every major university gives lip service to undergraduate education, but JMU truly cares about it.”

Gallagher joined JMU’s Department of Management as an assistant professor in 2000, earned tenure and promotion in 2006 and was promoted to full professor in 2011. Gallagher won the College of Business’s Distinguished Teacher Award in 2008, was elected by the students for the Otto C. Brenner Teaching Award in 2009 and was selected as the Madison Scholar for the College of Business in 2010. In 2010, he also served as Faculty Senate Marshall.

From 2010 to 2015, Gallagher served as Academic Unit Head for the Department of Management, leading (in what he describes as “a collegial manner”) a group of 22 full-time faculty members. "Among the things of which I'm most proud," he says, "is that during the five years I was AUH, no one left." He calls it “a welcome period of stability,” adding that, “I hope I was able to recreate the same support and stability I myself had enjoyed as a faculty member, and especially hope that junior faculty would say it was a nice time to be in the department.”

In July 2019, Gallagher was named Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, the title he currently holds. In this role, he authored the report on the Continuous Improvement Review conducted in 2021 for the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the chief accrediting body for the College of Business.

However, he’s even prouder of the strategic plan he wrote for the college. “I met with anyone who would talk to me,” says Gallagher, “and thought it was a hard-hitting and thoughtful plan that spoke realistically about some things the College of Business was up against.” As such, he says, it provided valuable guidance to members of the faculty and staff.

While those were satisfying achievements, Gallagher values even more his day-to-day work setting up committees to handle the awards, professorships and other laurels conferred by the CoB. “It’s really humbling to see all the great work that is being done at JMU,” he says.