Building on over a decade of success in providing technical assistance to universities in Poland, CCSU is finalizing an ambitious business education initiative within the former Soviet Union. Thanks to a $319,781 grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) through the Eurasia Foundation, CCSU’s School of Business is assisting European Humanities University (EHU) in Minsk, Belarus, in establishing a Master of Business Administration (MBA) program.

“As Connecticut’s publicly supported international university, CCSU has been among the leading proponents of educating people to unction in a free-market economy in the post-Cold War era. The University’s MBA Minsk initiative is our latest endeavor to extend friendship and share knowledge with new independent states in Eastern Europe,” said President Richard L. Judd. “This grant-funded project will lead to a self-sustaining and self-supporting MBA program in Belarus to meet that country’s current educational and social needs, which have been brought on by the new market economics,” President Judd said. 

“With this new funding, we can continue to promote progress in that part of the world by helping to train educators to prepare coming generations for fruitful lives in the emerging free-market global economy,” noted Dr. Daniel J. Miller, dean of the School of Business. “School of Business faculty members will also help set new standards of professional business education grounded in the principles of a market economy. As we refine program elements developed during earlier phases, we will begin to offer an Executive MBA (EMBA) program at European Humanities University in Minsk. Faculty from CCSU and from Southern Connecticut State University are working together to assure the success of this program.”

“The EHU’s contacts in Poland and in Germany, here CCSU has long been involved, attracted our attention as a potential site for further development in Eastern Europe,” said Lisa Marie Bigelow, assistant director of the George R. Muirhead Center for International Education. “CCSU faculty members have developed productive relationships with EHU faculty, and we have introduced our new Belarus colleagues to their counterparts at the Leon Kozminski Academy of Entrepreneurship and Management in Warsaw, a CCSU partner and one of the first centers in Poland to offer a Western-style MBA program.”

The Eurasia Foundation was created by the U.S. government in1993 and is funded by USAID and other public and private donors. The Foundation is an independently managed grant and loan making organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with field offices in 12 of the New Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union. With an open-door policy designed to encourage initiative at the grassroots level, the Foundation’s field offices respond to local funding needs by providing financial support for economic development and civic reform and by helping the NIS build strong, market-driven economies within a solid democratic framework.

CCSU Courier