• New Dean Philippe Haspeslagh gives welcome speech

The official start of the new academic year is always a special moment. New students, new programmes, new expectations…For Dean Philippe Haspeslagh it was an honour to welcome newcomers to Vlerick. Here are a few highlights from his speech.

On our Ghent and Leuven campuses there are a total of over 400 Masters, part-time MBA and full-time MBA candidates who have just started their programme. This is a record in terms of numbers for Vlerick, which certainly did not come at the expense of quality but reflects our growing appeal and reputation.

For the moment I am still called “our new Dean”. Being new somewhere brings with it the temporary ability to recognise what I would call “the smell of the place”. I hope that you have the same first impressions as I had when, a few months ago, I re-entered the Vlerick School, where in 1972 I was sitting in your place studying for what was then called PUB, and today the Masters in General Management. I am re-experiencing Vlerick as a place that is vibrant, entrepreneurial, with a real team spirit and dedicated employees who work hard. This is remarkable for an institution that is more than fifty years old, and even more remarkable for an academic institution.

Most strong institutions owe their culture to their founder. Dries Vlerick, the founder of your School was a remarkable man: a banker, professor, politician and entrepreneur. Above all, he was a man of passion and rectitude, who played a crucial role in professionalising Flemish businesses and opening up our region to multinational companies. Vlerick is not just the name of a school; it also stands for an idea and an ambition. This ambition is still in progress, and we hope to carry its torch the next mile.

You came here, of course, to get a diploma, a Masters after Masters, or a post-experience MBA. You uprooted yourself and, for some of you, even your family to study full-time, or you committed your family to accept the burden of limited availability if you chose to study part-time. You may still have some concerns about whether you made the right choice. In this matter you have a disadvantage, of course: as in all the real commitments in life, you cannot really compare with the road you did not choose to take. Let me tell you, however, that Vlerick is - in my personal experience of several schools - rather unique, in ways that should matter to you as students.

One dimension of this uniqueness has to do with its institutional context, being the autonomous business school of two great universities. Some business schools that are completely embedded in a university are mere fronts for theoretical management science departments. Whilst theoretically excellent, their faculty staff may not always recognise what is relevant for managers. Some might not even recognise a company if they fell over one. Other business schools are largely based on lecturing by external practitioners and visitors. Vlerick, with two great parent universities yet with its own autonomy, is one of a select group of schools where a proper faculty combines both academic research and relevance to practice. This means teaching will be based on management research but by teachers who know what the business issues are and are well-versed in leading-edge practice in their field.

The lofty ambition of a professional degree in business - as the founders of the first MBAs envisaged - is to help you become professionals. A professional is someone who not only masters a codified body of knowledge and its practical application, but who also conducts him or herself in a professional and ethical manner. Professor Vlerick, the founder of our School was certainly someone for whom professionalism and moral rectitude was the driving force. In fact, through his personality, and through the School, he has done more to professionalise the Flemish region’s enterprises than anyone you can think of. His values and moral rectitude stood out, even if it had to come at the expense of a shortened political career. We hope that, over the coming year, you too will learn to appreciate the central role of values and a personal code of ethics in making the calls - both minor and major - you will be faced with in business life, as well as the importance and fragility of the reputation of a business, and more importantly of your own personal reputation.

You may be put in a mixed group with a Dutch engineer, a Flemish psychologist and an Indian software specialist, none of whom seems to understand that your approach is the right one. You may recognise that many stereotypes are true, but become better at dealing with them. What we hope to offer you is a condensed accelerated experience that prepares you better for our global world, which is increasingly becoming flat again.

We hope you truly progress on the path of self-knowledge and use this year to clarify not only your professional purpose, but also your self-purpose. For those of you who have a job, it will be an opportunity to question and hopefully strengthen your commitment. For others it will be a year-long search, sometimes a nervous one, for their next job. Those of you who are dead certain what you want to do when you leave Vlerick - and who stay on that course - are blessed, as you will have more peace of mind and more time for interesting things than your fellow students. I suspect there are not many in that position. You may have no clue, you may be seduced by the sirens of management consulting and private equity like so many, or you may change your mind many times. Rest assured, even if our economy is heading for a downturn, Vlerick’s record of employment within three months of graduation is “best in class”.

Dear students, as I said before, you are joining an institution which is fifty years young - quite a respectable age for a business school. We are a dominant brand in Flanders and Belgium and are committed to increasing our international reputation. You may have met, or will soon have the opportunity to meet, some of our alumni, sometimes referred to as “Vlerick boys and girls”. Just as there are Apple fans - who remain loyal and seek to proselytise no matter what the market share of Microsoft is - so too we hope many of you will turn into Vlerick die-hards, ready to keep the flame burning and give back to the School in diverse ways.

As a new Dean I joined a great team of people who in the last few years have started to leverage this special position in the Flemish and Belgian market for management education into a credible international ambition. In St Petersburg a group of 40 part-time MBA students will start their programme next month, and I have just returned from China where at Beijing University - China’s premier university - 140 part-time and 60 full-time MBA candidates are studying for the same Vlerick degree as you. I hope that you will find some opportunities to exchange with them, before seeing some of them at graduation time.

At the heart of our ambition for the School is a desire to increase and enhance the faculty team with both Belgian and international talent. The business of business schools is supply-driven - excellent faculty staff create visibility and programmes that attract excellent participants. Vlerick has been blessed in having had a great generation of faculty members, some who helped build the place and are now retired, others who today shoulder the weight of the School. For them and for you, our most important task is to increase the faculty team and build up a new generation that will be even better. This will mean not only recruiting staff and helping them develop as teachers and communicators, but also helping them to establish a reputation for the School by leaving time for research as well.

Finally, I only have one word of advice to you, our 2009 graduates, which may come naturally to most of you: “work hard and play hard”. Have a great year.