Produced by: The Peter J. Tobin College of Business
January 25, 2018
The Peter J. Tobin College of Business at S. John’s University has been selected as a Champion Institution by the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) for 2018-19, one of only 38 institutions from 20 countries to attain this distinction.
As a PRME Champion, “Tobin is committed to integrating the UN Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) into curriculum, research and partnership activities in collaboration with Champion institutions from around the world,” said Associate Dean for Global Initiatives Linda Sama, Ph.D.
PRME Champions lead in collaboratively transforming the landscape of higher education by incorporating the SDGs into the ethos of business schools. The SDGs were agreed upon by world leaders in 2015, and are a call to action to address issues of poverty, inequality and climate change.
The SDGs have been incorporated into many Tobin courses, at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Most prominent among them is International Social Entrepreneurship, which covers the SDGs as part of its microloan program with a mission of poverty alleviation, and invites guest speakers on this topic.
Two marketing courses – undergraduate-level “Creativity and Innovation for Business and Society,” and graduate-level “Services Marketing” -- identify and seek to solve local problems through a global SDG lens. Students spend the semester designing and launching a prototype of a service potential solution to the problem they identified with real users.
Undergraduate and graduate courses in Sustainability Accounting and Reporting are taught by a faculty member who is certified in the Fundamentals of Sustainable Accounting (FSA) by the Sustainable Accounting Standards Board (SASB). SDGs are also a big part of two economics courses, Economic Development and Macroeconomics.
Three online management courses, undergraduate Global Business Policy and graduate Managing for Global Success, and Seminar in Entrepreneurship are involved in the PRME project called AIM2flourish. This project involves interviewing business executives about their efforts to realize one of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
“St. John’s University is honored to be one of the selected PRME Champions this year, and we are proud to be a thought leader in sustainability and responsible management education,” said Norean R. Sharpe, Ph.D., Dean of The Peter J. Tobin College of Business at St. John’s University.
The announcement of the PRME Champions was made at the 2018 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
About PRME
Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) is a United Nations-supported initiative founded in 2007 as a platform to raise the profile of sustainability in schools around the world, and to equip today's business students with the understanding and ability to deliver change tomorrow. As a voluntary initiative with over 650 signatories worldwide, PRME has become the largest organized relationship between the United Nations and management-related higher education institutions. Working through a set of Six Principles, PRME engages business and management schools to ensure they provide future leaders with the skills needed to balance economic and sustainability goals, while drawing attention to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and aligning academic institutions with the work of the UN Global Compact.