On entrepreneurship professor Greg Fairchild: “Fairchild’s class felt like an intimate, intellectual conversation amongst 65 of your closest friends, not a typical classroom.”
What does it take to be an extraordinary teacher? Certainly, a passion for learning and the ablity to communicate that passion to others. In academia, of course, scholarly research is also crucial.
But in the case of Greg Fairchild, who has been teaching at the University of Virginia’s Darden Business School for the past 18 years, it’s more than that, much more. A master teacher of Strategic Management, Entrepreneurship, and Ethics who has won multiple awards for his work in the classroom, he also has done something that no other business school professor has done. He has gone behind bars to singlehandedly create a program to help prisoners in Virginia state correction facilities learn business basics.
For his dedication to teaching and scholarship, for creating a highly novel program to help others, for being an inspiring, warm, open and tough teacher throughout an extraordinary career, Fairchild has been named MBA Professor of the Year by Poets&Quants.
AN ACCIDENTAL BUSINESS SCHOOL PROF
Fairchild exemplifies the teaching ethos at Darden, known as the business school with the world’s best teaching faculty. “One of the things about anything an organization sets out to do is intentionality,” he says. “So when we think about teaching at this institution, we think about what happens in the classroom. We also think about what happens outside the classroom. And that involves both our interaction that we might have with students, talking in the hallway, working with students on individual research projects. and having students into your home for dinner.
“But it also involves the way we as a faculty actually interact about teaching. I can tell you that in an institution like this one, while faculty might in the hallway be talking about the latest monograph that came out, it’s equally if not more common that they say, ‘So how did the Crocs case go today? And when you did this turn in the case, what did students say?’ We’re encouraging each other, challenging each other, and there’s even just a little bit of competition to be better at that. And so it’s this thought about teaching that is frequently in the discourse and in the things we do to make it happen.”
Fairchild is obviously no newcomer to the field, though he is an accidental professor of sorts. What started out as a trip to business school to get ahead in the fashion industry turned into a lifetime of teaching and research for him.
HE COULD HAVE BEEN IN FASHION ALL HIS LIFE
Fresh out of college in 1988 with a degree in communications, Fairchild’s hard work as an undergraduate paid off when he landed a job at New York’s famed Saks Fifth Avenue. As a manager in the women’s department, his day to day tasks ranged from managing a team of eight to closing the deal on $6,000 couture dresses. When his mentor, a senior VP of Saks, asked him how far he’d hoped to take his career, Fairchild replied that he had his sights set on general manager. So the mentor advised him that, to get on the fast track, his ticket was the MBA degree.
As it turned out, Fairchild’s advisor couldn’t have been more wrong. “Out of 300 students in my MBA class, maybe three of us were from retail.” Likewise, Fairchild says when he completed the degree, there weren’t many retailers breaking their necks to put him on the “fast track.”
Yet there was a silver lining. His time spent pursuing his MBA afforded him some unique opportunities which eventually laid the groundwork for him to become a top business professor. Oddly enough it would come to pass that he would teach at the very school he attended for his own MBA.
SELLING PIZZAS IN MOSCOW
While pursuing his MBA at UVA’s Darden School, Fairchild participated in a trip to Moscow where the students were tasked marketing a Pizza Hut operation in the region. As he thought how to sell an American product in a communist market, Fairchild penned a case which later became one of Darden’s most frequently taught and best-selling case studies.
But it wasn’t his ability to write a good case study that got him thinking about a teaching career. It was the encouragement of a Darden professor who saw Fairchild’s potential and pointed him in the direction of a PhD. “I did not enter Darden thinking I would be sitting in front of you now talking as a professor,” he says. “I was pretty clear that I was going to head into the brand management consumer business. I had been in the fashion business. For me, that seemed like a proper path. While I was here, though, because of the very thing you talk about, some of the faculty got to know me, and I was shocked during the end of my first year, when one of the faculty, who is now one of my faculty colleagues, said, “You know, the way you ask questions in the room, you might want to think about coming back and getting a PhD. And I’ll tell you I was both flattered and afraid because I didn’t see myself as that type of person.”
After completing his degree at Darden he remained connected to fashion as best he could, accepting a position in Procter & Gamble’s cosmetics division. “Not until I asked myself, ‘what if you could have a career where you could study businesses around the world and the ways in which these businesses enter into new markets?’” With this defining “ah-ha” moment, Fairchild headed to New York in 1995 to pursue his PhD at Columbia University, only to start as an assistant professor at Darden after earning his PhD in 2000.
Teaching seemed to come natural to him. As one former student puts it, “Greg truly wants to build a relationship with each and every one of his students, a relationship that extends well beyond the walls of Darden and the lessons of ethics or strategy. He deeply cares about each of his students and wants to not only see us succeed in our chosen careers but also find happiness and balance in our personal lives.”
But it wasn’t until a letter arrived in 2011 in the mailbox of then Dean Robert Bruner that one of the most extraordinary things occurred.
A LETTER TO THE DEAN & A PROGRAM IN JAIL
The letter was from a prisoner whose release date was fast approaching. The writer asked how he the school could help him turn his entrepreneurial idea into reality.
“Usually that gets a laugh from people who are in the know because, well, the Darden School runs programs at $49,000 a year,” says Fairchild. But Bruner insisted on giving the writer an answer, and called on Fairchild to do so. “‘Greg, I mean to respond to this gentleman,'” Bruner told Fairchild. “‘I mean to say something. I don’t know what we’re going to say, but I mean to say something.'”
“I was well aware of the challenges the nation was having around the incarceration levels that we have in the country, the size of it,” recalls Fairchild. “We have the largest prison system in the world. It bothered me. I didn’t know exactly what I could do a business person, as a business professor to be of help.”
Then, Bruner turned over the letter from the prisoner, Jervon Herbin. “Jervon’s letter talked about his desire to make a new change in his life. He’d made mistakes. He’d reached a point in his life where he’d learned that he was neither invulnerable nor infallible. And he recognized that what he needed was a business education. He knew how to do repairs. He knew the construction trade. And he felt like he could be employed. But he felt like there were other parts of understanding the way business organizations worked and understanding the way finance works, personal finance even.”
A BENEFIT TO STUDENTS’ HEARTS
Within three months, Fairchild found himelf in front of a group of 13 male prisoners at Dillwyn Correctional Facility. He also persuaded four MBA students to create a curriculum on how to start a small business. Nearly seven years later, the program has flourished. In the latest round, 33 second-year MBA students applied for the 28 teaching slots at two Virginia prisons, one at Dillwyn for men and another at Fluvanna for women. They teach two-hour-plus classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays in a trio of courses: entrepreneurship, financial capability and the foundations of business. It’s not an easy assignment. Students teach 30 weeks a year, a total of at least 240 hours of instruction per year in each facility.
In the six years since the program’s launch, graduates of the program will total more than 450 by year’s end. Some 136 Darden MBAs have taught over that timeframe. No less impressive, the school has written 68 case studies for use in the three programs and also created a non-profit organization to administer the program with his wife, Tierney, who is also a Darden MBA.
“There’s a stereotype that’s out there about business school and businesses,” says Fairchild. “That it’s about money. That it has little to do with worrying about other than self. Well, at Darden we don’t believe that. We teach ethics. We teach all those things. This is one example of where it is real, it is clear. Students find themselves going two nights a week to teach people who I’m not sure are going to benefit them directly in their financial pockets. But they do so because they feel like it’s benefiting them in terms of their hearts, and in terms of our society.”
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