Baldwin Wallace’s Carmel Boyer School of Business Builds Leaders With Real-World Skills

For decades, Northeast Ohio businesses have sought leaders with good character who also benefit from a practical application of their education. Many of those leaders come from Baldwin Wallace University through its Carmel Boyer School of Business.

While the school was named for Willard (Bill) Carmel and George T. Boyer in 2022 (both legendary business leaders), it has a legacy that stretches back to 1940 with Jacob O. Kamm, indeed even before that. But its future for personal and professional development extends well into the future.

Like most business schools in Northeast Ohio, Carmel Boyer has a full slate of undergraduate programs from accounting and finance through business and data analytics, digital marketing and innovation. But there are also specific and more focused streams like sports management and visual communications. Graduate and professional programs include an MBA, but there are also a Master of Accountancy track, Graduate Certificates and Professional Development programs.

But this institution focuses on giving students real world applications and positioning for success. Former CEOs, senior business leaders, dynamic corporate executives and PhDs teach students how to apply what is learned in the classroom to the real world.

“If we want to grow our state and region, we must support the needs of our local, regional and national employers. They demand human capital as one of their principal requirements for expansion, growth or relocation,” says Bill Summers, retired chairman and CEO of McDonald Investments Inc., who is also former chairman of the NASDAQ stock market and a former director of the New York Stock Exchange. “The Carmel Boyer School of Business is critically important to that mix,” he adds.

“We instill in our students a responsibility beyond the workplace, but we also have a very holistic approach to graduating students who are prepared with practical knowledge and experience, not just book knowledge,” points out Summers, who graduated in 1972 and retired in 2006, but who has remained active and has served on numerous boards including Baldwin Wallce University and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, as well as a corporate director of RPM International Inc., among many others.

“Throughout my career, I have worked with some very smart and talented people, but I never thought I was outdone or outsmarted by people who attended an Ivy League College or who went to near Ivy schools. I always felt that I was well prepared for any professional challenge that I faced through BW’s business programs.”

Those programs, says Summers, have a touch of humanity that you might not find at other schools.

“We are all about our students, and we care about their success,” he says. “We provide them with the tools they need to ultimately become a success in business but also a contributing member and a leader of the communities in which they live and work.”

Carmel Boyer helps educate and inspire leaders who then go into companies and make a difference, says Paul Clark, a fellow member of BW’s board who served as regional president for PNC Bank in Cleveland. Like Summers, Clark’s exemplary 43-year business career is impressive, also serving on numerous boards such as the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Cleveland Council on World Affairs, Gordon Square Arts District, the United Way of Greater Cleveland, the Greater Cleveland Partnership and University Hospitals Health Systems, to name a few.

“I had already started my career, when I it dawned on me that I really had no business education whatsoever. So I decided to go back,” says Clark who earned his MBA from the school in 1981. “I absolutely fell in love with the BW program. They have a very horizontal approach to learning — of the need to use diverse disciplines to make something happen.

“But it’s really all about character and purpose,” adds Clark.