Innovation in Academia: A Conversation With John Veitch, PhD, CFA
With almost four decades of experience as a professor of economics and an academic leader, it’s easy to imagine that John M. Veitch, PhD, CFA, dean of the Notre Dame de Namur University School of Business and Management, was born ready for his career and that it all came quite naturally to him.
However, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
“Coming out of high school, I didn’t even know economics was a thing,” Dr. Veitch remembered, noting that he was also the first person in his family to go to college. “I was going to be a mathematician, so I majored in math for the first semester. It was brutal.”
After that, Dr. Veitch gave physics a shot, but the academic challenges continued, forcing him to take a good look at his interests and abilities.
“I was really good at math, but I’m really good at math as applied to the real world, not really good at math as a philosophical pursuit,” he said.
After that realization, Dr. Veitch took a cue from some of his friends and decided to try majoring in economics. “It was just the perfect blend of math and analytics,” he recalled.
Since finding his field, Dr. Veitch has done everything he can to expand it, keep it relevant, and put students and their career goals first. During his first two years at NDNU, he’s shown how committed to that goal he is.
Discovering a Passion for Education
After earning his PhD in Economics in 1986, Dr. Veitch had planned to go into government and use his expertise to make a real difference in the world. Instead, he took on an assistant professor position in Southern California and discovered he could have an impact in a completely different way.
“My whole career has been a series of fortunate stumbles. I ended up loving teaching. I’m very fortunate because I had literally zero exposure to it when I was going through my PhD.” Dr. Veitch joked. “I like to see something in a student’s eyes when you say the right thing and it just unlocks a concept. There’s just nothing like that.”
Driven by that passion, Dr. Veitch made his way to the Bay Area, where he became a tenured professor of economics, a post he held for about three decades. Even though this first-generation college student from Ontario, Canada, had undoubtedly found his niche, he still had another horizon to explore.
Tackling the Ills of Academia
As much as Dr. Veitch thrived in academia, he became painfully aware of the issues that plague colleges and universities everywhere. For starters, he found that long-tenured professors often held onto their class schedules, leaving little room for professional development and curricular variety. More importantly, he saw how departmental factionalism could stymie growth and innovation on an organizational level.
With those issues in mind, Dr. Veitch turned to educational leadership, taking on roles such as department chair and associate dean. This proved to be yet another fortunate stumble in the right direction.
“I enjoy leadership and most academics don’t. I think it’s the economist in me,” he said. “It’s about setting up processes. It’s about looking at things and seeing how the world works and then determining how you can make things happen more effectively.”
From there, Dr. Veitch assumed more senior positions and had an even bigger impact on the organizations he served.
Hiring Smart and Fostering Innovation
Among other roles, Dr. Veitch has been the director of a master’s in financial analysis program and the head of the CFA Institute’s Learning Experience and Assessment Development team.
“What really mattered to me was putting together a community of faculty who are going to be bigger than they would be on their own,” he said of his leadership style. “It’s interesting to put a mathematician, a statistician, a marketing person, and an economist in the same room and have them discuss what the program should be because it’s like four foreign languages.”
However, Dr. Veitch wasn’t just throwing experts from multiple disciplines together just for the fun of it. He was crafting business and management degree programs that reflected the dynamic environments today’s business school graduates work in.
“I got to the point of producing new programs that were assembling knowledge in ways that society needed as opposed to assembling knowledge in the ways the ivory tower had always done,” Dr. Veitch said.
Through this unique approach, Dr. Veitch has led organizations into new territory. Recently, he’s developed data science-oriented business programs, established and streamlined online education programs, and helped organizations deliver on their promises of giving students a career-focused business education.
Dr. Veitch has been using that tenacity and talent to improve and expand the School of Business and Management since 2023.
Dean Veitch: The First Two Years
Dr. Veitch was first attracted to NDNU’s readiness and willingness to innovate. One of his proudest achievements is bringing the School of Business and Management fully online and asynchronous. Now, more talented professionals than ever can learn the skills they need to advance their careers.
However, that’s not all Dr. Veitch has been up to over the last two years. He’s also been working hard to add more value to the Master of Business Administration (MBA) program and lay the groundwork for continuous innovation.
Making Graduate Business Education Hands-On and Practical
According to Dr. Veitch, MBA students at NDNU are often working professionals. Many don’t see themselves as particularly academic, but they are smart and hardworking, and they want to advance their careers.
Dr. Veitch and his team have dedicated much time and energy to ensuring that these students graduate with everything they need.
“We put together practical projects so that a student’s eight-week course leads to something that's of use to them,” he said of the hands-on curriculum. Depending on which degree track they choose, students develop marketing plans and other concrete resources they can use immediately in their current positions.
Establishing the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning
One of the first orders of business for Dr. Veitch and his new colleagues was establishing the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL). Through CETL, all NDNU instructors can get support for designing or redesigning courses, so the curriculum stays student-focused and up to date.
“We have great instructional designers,” Dr. Veitch said of the CETL team. “They build up culture, and whatever they learn from each school, the best of it gets disseminated out to everybody.”
This means that when professors, researchers, and instructional designers come together to improve one course at CETL, the rest of NDNU benefits as well. As technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) continue to redefine business practices, this kind of interdisciplinary cooperation will be vital to every student and every field.
Advance Your Career in a Community of Innovation
As important as innovation is to Dr. Veitch, that’s not the only reason he feels at home as dean of the School of Business and Management. No matter what he’s working on at any given moment, he knows he and his colleagues all have the same primary goal.
“At NDNU, we’ve got people who are really, really, really interested in their students, and I think it’s hard to oversell that,” he said. “What I’ve tried to do over the past two years is provide them with the opportunities to be the best they can possibly be for the students. My job is to make the best possible learning environment. That’s the real key to making NDNU a success.”
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