Opinion | Bentley University’s E. LaBrent Chrite on AI, jobs – The Boston Globe

Chrite and his team are also creating more opportunities for students to pursue entrepreneurial ventures, because studies show that college students are increasingly interested in starting their own businesses.

When I met with Chrite recently, he also defended business schools from critics who question the value they provide to society. The following conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

From what I can see, Bentley has a healthy balance sheet and steady enrollment. Why do you think you’re doing better financially than many of your peers?

I think that’s true, regretfully for the industry. I want to be candid. We are impacted by these myriad challenges like every other institution. We just commit ourselves to being better prepared to deal with it. So, we do have a relatively healthy balance sheet. We do have healthy income statements. Our cash flow is relatively solid and predictable, and we’re able to make pretty major investments on campus. We also had a record number of applicants for this past class. It wasn’t easy.

Obviously, there are fewer students, lots of competition, lots of institutions with bigger brands and more money. But we continue to do well for a reason that is pretty basic. The market is calling for what we have always been. Where other institutions are seeking to pivot and focus on outcomes [and] to make sure that students have the right mix of adaptive technical skills — that’s what we’ve been forever. It’s almost a full circle moment that the marketplace has come around to say that’s what matters. We’ve always felt it matters, and it’s always been who we are. So now that the times and the conditions require it, we’re just better able to execute.

I’ve heard you say recently that Bentley has to innovate and try new things. Could you talk about that?

We consider it a privilege to be able to invest and to challenge ourselves and to move before it’s required to do so.

Because if we don’t, the marketplace will [eventually] do it for us. What does that look like? Layoffs, programmatic retrenchment, trauma. Folks trying to figure out who they are, what are their values, what do they hold on to? My previous presidency was at a really poor private HBCU [Bethune-Cookman University], just trying to figure it out, and so I know what it’s like to be at the mercy of financial exigencies, competitive headwinds, and governance and management challenges.

What is your vision for where Bentley needs to go?

We’ve always pivoted. We were the first university to offer all of our students laptops in the early ’90s. That willingness to see what’s coming and to step out there is part of our DNA, and so the next phase is to recognize that while we’re still an amazing accounting university and we’re still world class in finance, the market is expanding, and the role of AI and the need to navigate those technologies is part of what we’re looking to build here. We expect to ensure that our students maintain their skill sets, so that they remain the most sought-after professionals.

Everything we’re doing is being adjusted to meet the needs of a marketplace that doesn’t yet exist.

Accounting comes up as one of the fields very likely to be disrupted by AI. How are you thinking about that?

Well, we’re cognizant of it, and we are working closely with the the big four, the global seven, and the big regional [accounting firms] to help identify what the next generation of accountants looks like. How do we incorporate technology and analytics? Our graduate program in accounting is now accounting analytics. We work with the best firms in the world to define what those new standards are. As long as we’re at the table helping shape the industry, which we are because of the reputation of our faculty, then we’re going to be competitive.

The role of AI and its impact on those entry-level roles is on our minds constantly. Our job is to see what’s coming, and to educate our students appropriately.

What kind of student thrives at Bentley?

Students who come here, generally speaking, pretty much know what they want. They know they want business. Business has all kinds of connotations, and dimensions, but they know they don’t want to study nursing. They don’t want to be engineers. That helps our culture. They’re substantially type A. They’re pretty hard charging. They generally have strong work ethics. We know that they don’t fully understand it, but they appreciate the role of the market in their lives.

I have several friends who graduated from Bentley, and most of them are athletes. My parents went to Babson and were also athletes. Why are so many athletes attracted to business school and to the business world?

Athletes are disciplined. They are used to the hard work that is required for excellence. They hold themselves accountable, and they’re accountable to themselves and to their teammates or classmates. It’s no surprise that out of all Division II, we are the university with the second-highest GPA consistently. There is just something about the psyche of athletes at a business university.

There have been some pretty sharp critiques of business school in the national discourse lately. How do you respond to The New York Times essay by business professor Chris Marquis, who proposes business schools should be abolished?

I saw that article, and I’m a business school guy. I thought it was a little cynical, and I think it largely misses the point.

Here is my worldview, and it informs how I try to lead. My background is in international economic development and poverty alleviation. Over the last 30 years, I’ve worked with the World Bank, with the Department of State, with Eurasia Foundation in the poorest countries in the world — barely monetized, post conflict, from Rwanda after the genocide to Namibia immediately after its independence to Afghanistan and Ethiopia. I’ve been on the ground working with the most marginalized people on the planet, and the focus of every one of those efforts was always to create and sustain a viable private sector. It wasn’t about how much aid can we hand out. Of course, there’s aid. But fundamentally, I was on the ground to try to help kickstart entrepreneurial energy and private sector efforts that might take hold. Because without the market, without capitalism, without a minimally viable private sector and reasonably transparent policy environment, nothing else matters.

So, for me, the role of business and the role of business schools is not what was described in the article. We have no illusions that capitalism is a panacea. It has an insidiousness to it. There’s a stark underbelly. I’ve seen it at its worst. I’ve seen it at its best. And I submit, the world would be a whole lot worse off without it. Our job at places like this, is to educate students and to develop their appreciation for and capacity for their obligation to to create a capitalism that’s just better and more equitable.

We have students here who are in our Bentley Investment Group, and these students are going to go out and run private equity groups. We [also have] students who are working in our service learning center in some of the most marginalized communities in Waltham, supporting kids and women and the elderly, and that is what business schools have always done.

To suggest that you should just give up on it and attempt to just replace it — with what? It’s lazy intellectually, and I think it’s silly. We prefer to stay in the arena and to create the kind of students who recognize that there’s a higher purpose than just making money. Hell, we want them to make money because they have a lot of good they can do with their money. We want them to do so with a moral aptitude that represents more of what we think the world needs.

It was certainly an extreme proposal, but one thing the essay did make me think about is how universities could do a better job of helping students find a purpose and calling beyond wealth creation.

That’s the question. And when done right, it’s the beauty of traditional residential-based undergraduate education. If you set up the kind of experiences that enable students to fail and to iterate and to pursue multiple activities, preferably outside of their comfort zone, most people find their community. They find their passion. They discover characteristics and energy and talents that they never had, and they leave here fulfilled.

We orient our students with the notion that doing well and doing good are not mutually exclusive. And for you to really do well, you need to understand what it means to do good. That’s just built into the institutional ethos, to our curriculum, our service learning, our community engagement.

How do you support the liberal arts at a school like Bentley where business is the focus?

Again, I’m a business school guy. Our business school and our business education is as good as it is because of the liberal arts. We are a university at this intersection of business and the arts and sciences, and this hasn’t always been popular with our business faculty, but I think they appreciate it now. Our claim to fame is the way we integrate the arts and sciences. I remain convinced of that. Almost every business student, they’re going to have fluency around the keyboard. They’re going to understand how to extract data and how to analyze data; to think deeply and critically, to communicate with comfort and ease, without hubris, to work in teams to solve problems. So those adaptive capacities, which come from the liberal arts, are deeply embedded in our business education. I love that about this place.

Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com.