Posts by Emily Lammers

The 1994 conference was a high point, but just a beginning. At the onset, the planners had not known, until the first responses filtered in, whether there was demand for their offering. In 1995, as they expanded the outreach and launched a second campaign, they found that indeed there was: the second conference drew more…

Mel Stith felt excitement rising in him as he stood by the registration counter and watched the people arrive. First in a small trickle, then in clumps and then in a crowd they came. “Yes, this is going to be something special,” he thought. It was the evening of December 14, 1994, and the scene…

September in San Francisco is a refreshing antidote to a punishing East Coast summer. The cool breezes can clear out  mental cobwebs and awaken brain cells dulled by months of heat and humidity back home. Perhaps this explains why an idea suddenly hit Bernie Milano as he strolled the exhibition floor at the National Black…

Milano’s spontaneous promise to “fix” the problem that Carolyn Callahan had exposed in Montvale—that new doctoral recruits would need peer and mentor support to get over the many hurdles of earning the degree—turned out to be simple, conceptually, to keep. There were, KPMG determined after several months of outreach and research, just 42 African-American accounting…

That spring, as Milano and Thorp made their customary rounds of meetings with  academic  groups,  they  shared  an  idea  that had gained momentum during the Montvale sessions: a national conference to assemble all those African-Americans, Hispanic- Americans and Native Americans who would be responding soon to the still-to-be created and funded marketing campaign that would…

Carolyn Callahan endured in silence the indignity of being pushed in a wheelchair through bustling Newark Airport. Fiercely independent and highly accomplished as  a  scholar,  she  was  not happy about being transported in this manner. But she knew she was simply not capable at that moment of getting from gate to taxi on her own…

Supporting current doctoral students in accounting would help those individuals and align with KPMG’s interests.  But it was a small dent in the larger challenge of attracting a vastly bigger pool of underrepresented minorities to become professors in all business disciplines. Only four African-Americans surfaced to qualify for the new KPMG scholarships. (Milano would soon meet a fifth,…

Others were asking the same questions. AACSB, the body that accredits business schools and  GMAC,  the  organization  that conducts the GMAT test for business  school  admission,  had sponsored the abandoned MSI program. Disappointed in its outcome, they remained greatly concerned about the lack of diversity in business schools—both on faculty and as students. A paper…

“Lake Tahoe,” thought doctoral student Michael Clement. “That’s what I need. It’s what we all need right now.” The bracing Sierra Nevada breezes of Tahoe, just a few hours’ drive from the pressure cooker that is Stanford University, seemed an ideal late summer cure for the grueling 1993-94 academic year he—and by extension his young…