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Kauffman Foundation awards College of Charleston $90,000 grant to strengthen entrepreneurship program

Dec. 1, 2003
Charleston Regional Business Journal
By Dennis Quick
Entrepreneurial ed. The Kansas City, Mo.-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, dedicated to promoting entrepreneurship nationwide, recently awarded the College of Charleston a $90,000 grant to help turn liberal arts students into entrepreneurs.

Through the grant, the College of Charleston will form an education partnership with the nearly 40-year-old Kauffman Foundation, whose resources—technical as well as financial—will help the college strengthen its entrepreneurship program. The foundation assists colleges and universities in exploring new ways for aspiring entrepreneurs to enter new and existing markets, developing faculty to meet entrepreneurial education needs and identifying entrepreneurial support organizations.

On the other end of the entrepreneurial equation, the foundation helps angel investors make wiser, better informed investments and promotes regional collaboration among angels. It’s possible that, through the C of C’s affiliation with the Kauffman Foundation, entrepreneur-minded liberal arts graduates will have a chance to meet angel investors.

It used to be that English majors, history scholars and other liberal arts graduates wondered how their degrees would earn them a living. Wonder no more, says John Clarkin, director of the College of Charleston’s Tate Center for Entrepreneurship. Use that liberal arts degree to start a business. It’s been done before, especially here in Charleston.

“Most of the entrepreneurs on King Street are liberal arts graduates,” Clarkin points out.

Clarkin calls entrepreneurship a vehicle for channeling creativity and innovation into business ventures that create economic, social and intellectual value. That’s pretty much the doings of the burgeoning “creative class,” those artists, scientists, engineers and other professionals whose brainpower is revitalizing many of our nation’s cities. Liberal arts graduates form a sizeable segment of the creative class, Clarkin asserts.

Kauffman Foundation officials agree. Interest in entrepreneurship has spread from the business school to engineering, life sciences and liberal arts schools. Since the early 1990s, when the trend began, more than 1,500 colleges and universities have begun to offer entrepreneurial training, according to the foundation.

In November, as part of its college entrepreneurship education program, the foundation sponsored a three-day entrepreneurship conference at the Tate Center. Academics from across the country gathered to discuss how liberal arts curriculums could foster entrepreneurial careers. It was the Kauffman Foundation’s second such conference since the foundation began the event last year.

Since Entrepreneur magazine recently ranked the Charleston-North Charleston area second among the South’s and ninth among the nation’s top midsized cities for entrepreneurs, the Kauffman Foundation sees the College of Charleston as a “natural” partner, says Tony Mendes, the foundation’s director of college initiatives.

“We hope to align academic initiatives with entrepreneurial opportunities in the Charleston area,” notes Mendes, adding that the College of Charleston can be a leader among the nation’s colleges and universities offering entrepreneurial training.

Sam Hines, dean of the college’s School of Humanities and Sciences, says the entrepreneurial program forces us to consider liberal arts education in a different light.

“It redefines liberal arts as practical education,” claims Hines.
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