LAWRENCEVILLE, NJ -- Dr. Sigfredo Hernandez, associate professor of marketing, and Dr. Biju Mathew, assistant professor of computer information systems, are the second recipients of the Jesse H. Harper Endowed Professorships in Rider University's College of Business Administration (CBA).

In the fall of 1994, Rider received a $1.83 million bequest from the estate of Lois A. Harper to establish the endowed professorships in memory of Jesse H. Harper, a 1949 graduate. Mrs. Harper did so because of her husband's love of Rider and her interest in helping young people.

The purpose of these professorships is to enhance the teaching and improve the instructional program of the business college through the professional development of its faculty. Rider students will be the ultimate beneficiaries of Mrs. Harper's generosity. During the grant period, faculty recipients are known as the "Jesse H. Harper Professor" in their given specialty.

Hernandez, a resident of Horsham, PA, will use the grant to implement a new community service/mentoring project called "Minding Our Business" (MOB). The program is designed to promote leadership, teamwork, and entrepreneurship skills among students at the Holland Middle School in Trenton through a Rider-based mentoring model, where CBA students will serve as mentors and gain education on the management side of business.

"CBA students will benefit by practicing social responsibility through their mentoring experience," said Hernandez. "They will have a chance to develop their leadership, communication, team building, conflict management, diversity management, and consulting skills. They will learn about business planning and the management process by overseeing the operations of microbusinesses run by sixth-graders."

The goal of the program is to have each group of 10 students develop an idea and present a business plan to the MOB Advisory Board, which will consist of the school principal, a Rider faculty member, and area business leaders. The board will grant up to $250 to each team's plan which will be used to execute and manage their businesses. The students will also get the opportunity to visit a corporate boardroom in Mercer County and meet top business executives.

Mathew, a resident of New York City, will use the professorship to explore the potential of the World Wide Web (WWW) as a medium for enhancing student-professor interaction. The premise of the project is that the WWW can overcome the traditional constraints of time and place in the classroom by permitting the student and teacher to interact from remote locations whenever it is convenient for each person. This would become the basis of a new "information age relevant" form of education.

The first step in the project is to develop an automated web-active course service (AWACS), which will provide the medium for student-faculty interaction in an education-enhancing manner. Workshops would then be coordinated with experts from Rider and other academic institutions to help CBA faculty integrate and use the technology as part of their course work.

High-quality teaching and research are benchmarks of the Rider business faculty, ninety-four percent of whom hold Ph.D.s. An announcement in the Journal of Finance of a five-year national study ranking finance faculty research productivity places Rider first among New Jersey private colleges and in the top 20 percent of 661 academic institutions. Similarly, the accounting faculty ranks higher than many well-known universities nationwide according to a study in Issues In Accounting Education. Meanwhile, the CBA is among the top 19 percent of business schools nationally and one of three in New Jersey to hold accreditation from the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB International). Overall, the University ranks in the top tier of northern regional colleges and universities according to U.S. News & World Report's Best Colleges Guide.