When Dr. Brewer Doran took the position of Dean at Concordia College’s Offutt School of Business in August, she brought a lot more than her luggage.

She brought 15 years of experience as a Dean – ten of which she served most recently in Boston as Salem State University’s Dean of Bertolon School of Business. She brought two kittens, Nathaniel and Alexander, who will eventually be the size of lynxes.

She also brought a fresh vision to a school that has been struggling with enrollment drops for the past five years. And she has big goals for the Offutt School of Business.

“Greg Cant did a great job taking it this far, but there’s a lot do be done,” she said. “The faculty is willing to move forward. They say, ‘Go do it. Make it better.’”

That’s precisely what she intends to do.

One of the first things Dr. Doran did was plug into the local tech community.

“The biggest surprise when I came here, and the biggest gift, is the Fargo-Moorhead business community,” she said. “Because it is really energetic. Really entrepreneurial. Also really intentional. That’s very rare.”

Coming from the Boston market, aka “the other Silicon Valley,” Doran was impressed with the energy and activity here, she said. She even called her friends who run accelerators and incubators in Boston to tell them what’s going on in Fargo, and say, “Why aren’t you doing this?” she said.

“I think the tech community here is far more energetic than it is in Boston,” she said.

Doran sees the tech community as a crucial piece to the puzzle in improving the Offutt School of Business, she said. Part of her efforts include creating a technology-based degree program that works closely with employers in the industry. This is the best way to ensure students are prepared for the work they’ll be doing, she said.

“The number one piece for me is that when we come back with a technology degree, that we have the blessing of the high-tech community in what we’re doing,” she said. “We have such a strong tech community here. It would be just wrong not to involve them in those discussions [about curriculum].”

Already, Doran said she’s met with people from Microsoft and others, to go over preliminary drafts of a curriculum. Her main focus is that the curriculum, which will have an emphasis on data analytics and project management, is relevant and hands-on.

“It needs to be project-oriented…so that students spend much more time than they have in the past doing real projects with real producers,” she said.

It makes sense, considering Doran’s own history is based heavily on hands-on experience in the business world – much more so than the “traditional Dean background,” she said.

Doran went to Dartmouth in the first year of coeducation and majored in art history with an anthropology minor. She went straight to business school to go into arts administration – a career field that was “a little ahead of its’ time,” she said. So she went to work in the industry, working with paper and timberwood. Then consulting. And in the meantime, she learned to fly.

Flying lead her to help run a fixed base operator (FBO), a place to teach flight school and service airplanes. In addition to baking cookies in the morning for clients filling their planes with gas, Doran started teaching flight school. Then teaching in the community college. And when she moved the FBO to California, she called up Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and asked if she could teach there, too. They agreed over the phone.

Eventually, she went back for her doctorate. But after only 5 years as a professor, she made the jump to become a Dean.

“I made this big jump because people knew me, and they knew my work experience,” she said.

Now, she’s in her 16^th year of being a Dean, Doran said. Nevertheless, she still calls herself a dilettante: “a person who cultivates an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge.”

“I’m a dilettante, I’m not sure what I want to be when I grow up,” she said. “But I also believe in recognizing opportunity when it’s there. And that the opportunity that comes next may not be the one that you expect.”

She certainly didn’t expect to move to Fargo-Moorhead, she said. Family in the Twin Cities and a hankering for colder weather had drawn her eye to the Midwest – but when she moved this far north, her friends called her “a little bit nuts.”

A few things sealed the deal, however. The engagement of students, who showed up to her public interview and asked her questions in follow-up. The blank slate of a new business school, ready for growth. The fact that her name is Brewer, nickname “Brew,” and Concordia’s slogan is BREW.

It was the community as well. Wherever she has lived, Doran has searched for places that have a soul, she said. She sees that in Fargo-Moorhead.

“[Fargo-Moorhead] is building its own history,” she said. “People who are from here really care about being from here. That a few people have come together and said we can make this a better place, and we can make the world understand how great a place it is… that’s a tremendous story to be told.”

Doran said she hopes to build the brand and reputation of the Offutt School of Business in a similar way that Fargo-Moorhead has built itself these past years.

“I would like to see the Offutt School become a truly magnet business school,” she said.

 

Photos courtesy of Concordia College and Marisa Jackels.