Joshua C Mitchell
Damon Fleming is a husband, father, and devoted surfer with a soul patch. He is also a researcher with B.S. and M.S. degrees in accounting from San Diego State University and a Ph.D. from Virginia Tech. His scholarly work is published in more than 25 accounting journals and before going into academia, he was a principal at a venture capital firm.
Up until this summer, he was professor and William E. Cole Director in the Charles W. Lamden School of Accountancy at SDSU. The school has 1,000 undergraduate accounting majors and 100 graduate students.
He left sunny SoCal to come to Memphis in July to be greeted by remnants of a tropical storm and impossibly high temperatures. But he stayed anyway to take a position as dean at the Fogelman College of Business and Economics at the University of Memphis. He came to town with his wife, two kids, surfboards, and a far-reaching vision for where he wants to take the FCBE. Inside Memphis Business sat with him in the college’s sleek Cook Analytics & Trading Lab to talk about what’s next.
Inside Memphis Business: First, a simple question: What is your goal at FCBE?
Dean Fleming: I’m a students-first kind of dean. It’s about how are we creating and curating the best experience for students that gets them ready for the job market. We’re going to take it to the next level, which isn’t new for the Fogelman College, but that’s part of my mission.
Another big part of the mission is building up connection points, building up purposeful integration between research, teaching, and student success. In the end what we’re doing is seeing all those augment each other and not compete for time and attention. We’re purposefully integrating that and dovetailing in with the university’s initiatives around moving to Carnegie R1 [a designation for very high research activity], around developing the research park, around U of M ventures — seeing how we can make the Fogelman College a destination, a place where companies can come find the best talent, but also a place for companies to move to, to gain access to that talent. So it’s not only to prepare students to go out in the world, but also be a source of attraction for the local economy.
IMB: When compared to other business schools, how is FCBE similar and how is it different?
Fleming: All university-level business schools offer four-year degrees in the typical business disciplines. Many of them, but not all, offer master’s degrees, and fewer than that offer research Ph.D.s. We happen to be all three. We are a full-service business school from that perspective in that we’re taking students who are right out of high school, and turning them into future business leaders. We’re taking people who maybe already have an undergraduate degree who want to go to the next level through the master’s. And we’re taking people who then go to the next level to become the creators of knowledge, the scholars of the future. From that perspective, there’s commonality and difference among our kind of peer group.
Where I think that we can be really unique is by integrating with what’s unique about our region. I’m still learning about this and how uniquely integrated we are, but in the last few weeks on the job I’ve seen a lot of opportunity for collaborating with the local business community, from large organizations like FedEx and International Paper to the very large proportion of small businesses that operate in Memphis. We’re making an opportunity where business schools can connect meaningfully with each of those levels. That’s where I think our uniqueness comes in, leveraging the unique components of the region.
IMB: What is the role of the business college?
Fleming: It could be this concept of both creation of talent and attraction. A lot of power and real kind of connection can come from this idea that what we do, our core purpose, is getting students ready for the market, but we also have to be mindful that by doing so we can draw business into the region as well. That’s the bigger vision that the campus has related to the research park and some other areas. It’s our job, I believe, to make that happen.
And when I saw the connection point between that purpose — my purpose — and what this university can do for the local area, what it can do for Memphis as a city, as well as the surrounding area, and then sending people out globally, it was just an incredible opportunity.
IMB: When you came to interview, what did you tell the selection committee?
Fleming: I told them why I was here. I just presented myself as genuinely as I could and I interviewed them as much as they interviewed me because I was at a university that I loved being at. I loved what I was doing. What I learned about the university got me so excited. I came and talked about what I believe is our authentic purpose of changing lives through business education. And that’s what I think business schools can do for students. And when I saw the connection point between that purpose — my purpose — and what this university can do for the local area, what it can do for Memphis as a city, as well as the surrounding area, and then sending people out globally, it was just an incredible opportunity. I communicated that I understood that opportunity and that I wanted to be a part of that. And I think everybody understood that that was authentically who I am and why I was interested and why I was willing to leave what I had to come and pursue this opportunity.
IMB: What were your impressions when you were researching Fogelman College?
Fleming: I looked at the full scope. My background is research, so I’m not only looking at one element. You’ve got to look at the portfolio. It’s like building a mosaic — you’re trying to understand what the picture is, but it’s all these little pieces. As I grabbed up little pieces, I started to build this broader picture of what the business college was and what the university was — the things that really excited me about it. One was that it’s the major powerhouse research university in the area. That’s super attractive. That’s a very important opportunity and leverage point, I think, for what we can do for students.
The second thing is the diversity of the students. I’m a huge proponent of university business education fundamentally altering what a student’s economic trajectory looks like. It is the path for social mobility for many, many students. And I love that; that’s what gets me excited about coming to work every day.
IMB: What do you want the school to be five, ten years down the road?
Fleming: Outcome driven, I want to see us with a portfolio of academic programming that is really meeting needs of students that match between the students and the business community. We’re making an effort to curate that kind of connection so that when companies large or small in the area think, where do I want to get my next employee from, it’s the University of Memphis Fogelman College of Business and Economics. That is critical, driving home that match, creating an integrated culture of research, teaching, and service for the campus. It’s those connection points that students feel and that faculty feels and the community feels between the research and the teaching and the work that we do in the community collaboratively. I’d like to see that come together.
And we’ll be creating a culture among the students, faculty, staff, and stakeholders that make this a destination for people. Universities run on top talent, just like all service organizations. And we have to be able to attract and retain the best talent we can for our students in research and teaching. And to do that, we’ve got to have a culture where people are here and they feel valued and they understand why we’re doing the work that we do together and they understand that we’re all trying to win.
IMB: How do you do that outreach to make sure that the rest of the world knows you’re here?
Fleming: A couple of different ways. Some is through legitimately telling our story. What can happen is that we’re just too humble about what we do and the success stories that we have. We’ve got to let people know about that. We’ve got to let people know what great work is going on and what those success stories look like. Other parts of it include expanding our research activity and impact to become an R1 level institution that puts us in the highest class of top-tier research universities in the world. That’s a campus mission. It’s the Fogelman College’s mission. That in and of itself, contributing to that mission, raises our national and global awareness in a serious way.
Another part is more of a grassroots approach. I want every student that leaves here and people who come and visit here to think this is an awesome place. This is the kind of place I want to send my kids to school. This is the kind of place I want to go back and get a graduate degree. Our best ambassador group is people who have a good experience and they can tell our story better than any billboard or news story ever could. It’s the long game.
IMB: How do you cultivate your alumni and get those donors to come in and be even more active?
Fleming: The philanthropic funding model for public universities over the last decade is a partnership model as I see it. It’s part funding from the state, part funding from tuition from students, part funding from donors and stakeholders that are invested in the success of the university: It’s a collaborative model. The way we leverage that is by finding the most high impact ways we can invest those resources and make strategic alignments. The way we do that is by telling about what is possible through the collaboration of state funding, philanthropic support, and the organic component that runs the university.
IMB: Tell me about you: What drew you into accounting?
Fleming: I think because I was practical. My vision of going to college was to leave the university with a degree that’s going to set me up for a career. Business made sense to me and within business, accounting made sense to me. I took a few classes and I had a natural aptitude for it, I think. I wanted to be a part of a profession and that was the best opportunity for me to do that right away. I didn’t see myself getting a Ph.D. and becoming a professor when I went to college. I worked and went to community college, I transferred to San Diego State University. It was my best path forward for getting a good career.
But what drove me into leadership was simply looking around and thinking there’s more that we can do. There’s other ways of thinking about solving the problems that universities face, and I wanted to be a part of the solution.
That’s why I picked accounting. I had a good aptitude and I love it. I got into academics because I had a chance when I was getting my master’s degree to teach a class and I loved it. My opportunity to connect with students in that way was transformational for me. I had some great mentors at the university who encouraged me to think about academics as my career path. I followed their advice and I couldn’t be happier. So I found myself in an academic career and I’ve spent the last 13 years as an academic. I worked my way through the ranks to a full professor and then as part of the leadership team, as director of a school of accountancy. And I’m here because it’s about expanding that impact. I wanted to do more than what I was doing with the school of accountancy. I could help more people through running a college and I got recruited for this job and I couldn’t be happier for it. Never looked back.
What drove me into leadership was that ability to make a bigger difference. Like when I’m teaching and I’m running my classroom, whether it’s with undergraduate students or graduate students, I’m touching a lot of lives. That was wonderful and I’m going to miss that. I’m cultivating new ways though — I was talking to students this morning about how I’m going to be visiting their classrooms because I love that opportunity to do it.
But what drove me into leadership was simply looking around and thinking there’s more that we can do. There’s other ways of thinking about solving the problems that universities face, and I wanted to be a part of the solution. As a professor, you have the ability to influence in real ways the research you’re doing and the teaching that you’re doing. But to really influence and move the college and move a university, you have to step up to the plate and join the leadership team. And that’s what I wanted to do.
IMB: So tell me about your family.
Fleming: I’m married with two children, a son who’s 14, a daughter who’s 12, all of whom are getting adjusted to living here in Memphis. They’re where I spend my time when I’m not with my students, when I’m not here at the university. I try and do as many things I can do to connect with my kids. You’ve got to find creative ways to engage and I’m big on experiencing things. I like to go do things together, preferably outside if we can. I grew up on the coast and so I spent my life in the ocean and fishing and those sorts of things. So we’ll be doing what we can of different variety here. I like to stay in shape, so I work out all the time. I get up nice and early in the morning doing my pull-ups this morning.
IMB: I don’t know how many deans of business schools there are who have soul patches, but you certainly do. How did you come to cultivate that?
Fleming: So here’s the thing: I tried really hard to be who I am, right? And that’s something that I’ve had for quite awhile. I’m a guy who’s been a surfer for 30 years or longer probably. This is who I am and I like to just be me and it’s worked so far. Though there’s no surfing around here, I have my surfboards in my garage at home because when I get a chance to take some vacation time, that’s what I’ll be doing.
This interview originally appeared in Inside Memphis Business.
