Business Creativity Key To Gu Program Entreprenurial Leadership Will Select Best And Brightest

Gonzaga University will launch an entrepreneurial leadership program next fall funded by the couple who founded Pleasant Hawaiian Holidays 41 years ago.

Ed and Lynn Hogan will contribute $150,000 the first year and more in the future as the program expands from an initial class of 20 students to 80, the Rev. Robert Spitzer, GU president, said Tuesday.

The four-year program will target students in disciplines from accounting to biotechnology who are enterprising, socially aware and among the top 20 percent of their classmates academically, he said.

“We want to develop a sense of community,” said Spitzer, who stressed that hearts as well as heads must be nurtured by the special curriculum, internships and mentoring at the program’s core.

Paul Buller, who holds the Kinsey M. Robinson Chair of Business Administration at the school, will direct the program.

He said the Gonzaga approach will differ from others studied by university officials in the variety of offerings and students who can participate.

Economics, accounting, ethics and how to create and incubate new ventures will be among the course offerings, he said.

With the admissions season already under way, Buller said, Gonzaga will have to scramble to make sure all potential candidates are made aware of the program, which could draw students who might otherwise bypass the school.

An initial pool of more than 200 candidates will be sifted to 70, who will then be screened by Scholastic Aptitude Test scores and interviews, he said.

“They have to have expressed some desire to create something,” Buller said.

Spitzer said he hopes those creations might evolve into real businesses that will benefit the Spokane community.

He said the entrepreneurial program, which will bear the Hogan name, grew out of a lecture on ethics he gave in Phoenix last winter. Ed Hogan attended.

After the talk, Spitzer recalled, “Ed came up to me like an Exocet missile.”

The encounter led to an ongoing discussion of ways to build a new curriculum around the concepts he had presented, Spitzer said.

Hogan said he was captivated by Spitzer and his ideas. “`Gosh, this is what I believe in,”’ he said he remembers thinking.

The Hogans had just established the Hogan Family Foundation with $100 million in resources from a multiplicity of travel businesses.

Their California-based companies, with 1,700 workers, take 400,000 people to Hawaii annually, and more still to Tahiti, Mexico and Japan.

“We can build a tremendous world, through commerce, of peace,” he said, noting that travel and tourism-related businesses now employ 10 percent of the world’s population.

Hogan once worked for Henry Kaiser, founder of Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corp., and Conrad Hilton. Those associations and others taught him how to give back to the community, he said.

Hogan was on the board of Loyola Marymount University for nine years, and the family’s foundation has also contributed to programs there.

He said the new relationship with Gonzaga has been energizing.

“We’re proud of how we brought this together,” he said.