A First for Finance

The Seidner Department of Finance named in honor of University Trustee Marc Seidner ’88, P’24, after a historic gift.

Listen to the audio version of this article

It’s long been one of the most popular majors—and the most popular of all minors—across all of Boston College. Within the Carroll School of Management, it claims the largest faculty—including the University’s sole Nobel laureate. Now, thanks to a visionary gift from University Trustee Marc Seidner ’88, P’24, the newly christened Seidner Department of Finance has made history as BC’s first named department, joining an elite group of similarly distinguished departments nationwide.

The largest in Carroll School history, the gift is a recognition of the department’s widespread reputation for excellence in research and teaching. It consistently ranks in the top 10 of U.S. News & World Report’s undergraduate program surveys and, as the John and Linda Powers Family Dean Andy Boynton ’78, P’13, proudly notes, it recently claimed the number nine spot worldwide in the prestigious Shanghai Ranking.

“We’re ahead of Duke, Washington University, Cornell, Berkeley—that’s pretty heady stuff,” Boynton says. “That just shows where this department is now. You can see it in the quality of our faculty; they’re the academic elite. And this gift is both a recognition of the department’s growth and a way to continue and even accelerate that growth.”

Leading the charge is the department’s chair, Haub Family Professor Ronnie Sadka, whose vigorous and ongoing hiring effort has attracted dozens of top scholars and substantially raised the program’s research profile. He also spearheaded efforts to introduce new management minors designed for non-management students, to extend the “tenure clock” to support tenure-track faculty’s development, and to introduce new opportunities for finance faculty to share research with peers across BC and in other institutions. 

Behind each initiative is the school’s commitment to offer each student a rigorous, transformative academic experience, says Sadka: “We have the privilege of our students’ attention for just four years, and that is a responsibility that we take very seriously when we think about teaching at the Carroll School.”

From Good to Great

Finance has been a cornerstone of the Carroll School’s curriculum, initially supported by a small but respected faculty focused on banking and corporate finance. The department grew slowly until the 2008 economic crisis, which led to a surge in student demand that, in turn, prompted a rapid expansion of both faculty and specialties. Today, the department boasts 39 full-time faculty members, up from 15 in 2008.

Philip Strahan, the John J. L. Collins, S.J., Chair in International Finance, credits Boynton, Sadka, and other administrators for managing the department’s rapid growth so that it was strengthened instead of strained. “We started to bring in younger academics and we’ve broadened our areas of expertise so that we have real breadth and depth not only in the fundamentals but across new fields; take for example Paul Schmelzing, who is a financial historian, and Paul Romer’s work in innovation and ideas.”

One of these strategic early-career hires was Wargo Family Faculty Fellow Nadya Malenko, who joined in 2011 fresh from earning a doctorate at Stanford University. “When I first came to BC, people told me it was a collegial group, but I didn’t really appreciate what they meant,” says Malenko, who recently returned to BC after teaching at another university for two years due to family reasons.

“We have something really unique here, people who truly respect each other and all work towards the same goal. Not that we don’t disagree,” she adds with a laugh. “But we talk, we listen, and we learn from one another. The group has such thoughtful and smart people, and it functions very well—which is more rare than you’d think.”

Part of what sets the Seidner Department apart is its dedication to faculty development. The Carroll School supports research through internal grants, undergraduate and graduate research assistants, and frequent opportunities to discuss and refine research through seminars, conferences, and other scholarly gatherings. Likewise, the school offers an array of initiatives on teaching, including extensive peer mentoring, professional development, and a number of awards and other opportunities for recognition.

The department’s collaborative spirit is intentionally cultivated, says Sadka, which sets it apart from some academic environments. “Being part of a team is not something that’s really taught in PhD programs, and not something that is rewarded at every university,” says Sadka, noting that academia typically focuses only on solo activities such as writing, publishing, and presenting. “In our department, our faculty go to lunch together, they meet to talk shop together, they are in constant communication and that is where it happens, the spark of an idea, a new research question, a novel course topic, an unexpected solution—that’s part of what makes our department special.”

The Role of Recognition

Recruiting and retaining the right faculty has never been an easy task, says Sadka, and the competition has only intensified as the department’s stature has risen. “Look, we’re a top-10 school, a top-10 finance department—we’re on the map. And even so we still lose [faculty] to places like Berkeley, to Yale, [and other] Ivies.”

That’s where the recognition that comes with being the first named department at BC, and one of only a few nationally, can make a difference. “It sends a clear and resonating signal to other universities, potential faculty members, and future students,” says Boynton. “Particularly with faculty, they want to work with great people, and they want to be great scholars. A gift like this shows them just how special this group is.”

The gift is the latest in a lifetime of giving from Seidner and his family. The chief investment officer for non-traditional strategies at Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO), Seidner was inspired by his own BC experience and the department’s evolution into “one of the premier undergraduate finance programs in the country and the world.” Though an economics major himself, Seidner forged deep ties with the Carroll School early in his finance career, beginning as a volunteer helping to plan and promote the school’s annual Finance Conference, now a flagship event that will celebrate its 18th year in May 2025.

“Here he was—very successful in the finance world—willing to roll up his sleeves and help put this conference together,” recalls Boynton. “We built an authentic working relationship, and that’s been the foundation for everything that’s come since, from his first endowed faculty fellowship to this extraordinary gift.”

Changing with the Times

BC’s College of Business Administration opened in 1938 with just 72 undergraduates taking classes in downtown Boston. The fast-growing program moved to Fulton Hall in 1948, gained accreditation in 1956, and was named the Wallace E. Carroll School of Management in 1989.

In addition to broadly supporting the department, Seidner’s gift expanded his family’s faculty fellowship into the Seidner University Professorship—the first of its kind at Boston College—which is held by Nobel laureate Paul Romer.

Named, endowed faculty positions such as this have played a vital role in the department’s upward trajectory. Established by generous alumni, parents, and friends, these funds provide high-performing faculty with the resources to advance their research and teaching agendas, as well as the heightened recognition that counts as currency among academics.

For Malenko, endowed fellowships enabled her to acquire necessary datasets, hire a graduate research assistant with whom she coauthored a paper, and travel to conferences to present and refine her research. Once published, her research attracted attention from both academic and mainstream media, and requests to speak to industry and policymaker groups.

For accomplished senior faculty such as Strahan, being appointed to a named, endowed professorship is a prestigious honor that recognizes their contributions to their field. “Having the Collins Chair has been a great honor, and it has absolutely helped advance my research,” says Strahan, who like most finance faculty has been approached several times by universities seeking to lure him away. “Why did I stay? I’ve been treated so well here; I couldn’t see any reason to go somewhere else.”

While the Seidner Department of Finance has made remarkable strides, maintaining and building upon its success will require continued investment and support from the BC community. As Sadka notes, “Everything that makes our department great—from hiring outstanding faculty to supporting student research to updating our curriculum—it all requires financial support. That’s why the Soaring Higher campaign is so important for us and for all of BC. We need help from the BC community—we just can’t do it without their support.”

As someone who has always been drawn to the seemingly unsolvable, Romer began to envision a way forward.

“I partly started looking into this issue of digital signatures because I wanted a way to protect myself, but it’s more than that,” says Romer. “Whether it’s a social media post, an email, or a research paper, you can’t trust anything unless you know who is behind it, who vouches for it. Digital authenticity is critical to research, business, and to the transmission of ideas that propel growth.” 

Romer joined the BC faculty in 2023 as the Seidner University Professor—the first such honor at BC—in the Carroll School of Management’s newly named Seidner Department of Finance. Through the school’s Center for the Economics of Ideas, he is working with students and fellow faculty to develop next-generation tools that can meet the growing demand for digital authenticity.

Here, the professor, described by some as “academic royalty,” explains the economics of ideas, shares his thoughts on trust, and opens up about his new home at the Heights. 

Where did the idea for the Center for the Economics of Ideas come from?

PR: The first step in harnessing the power of ideas is to recognize and then distribute them. When I first wrote about how different the economics of ideas are from the traditional economics of physical objects, people didn’t get it. Now, everyone sees how important new ideas are to economic activity. At the center, we focus on the practical steps needed to get better at producing and distributing ideas.

Discovery is not the only bottleneck that limits progress; it may not even be the main one. Consider vaccines: a new discovery won’t save lives unless lots of people get a shot in the arm, and that requires trust.

What drew you to Boston College?

PR: As academics, we teach and we produce what we economists call public goods, which are research papers that become part of a scholarly dialogue. BC offered me the chance to shift towards creating a different kind of public good: open-source software, the kind of free software that can serve as the foundation for further research and economic activity.

And the Seidner University Professorship—it’s more than financial support for my work, it’s a mark of significance or achievement that I can use to then go out and bring more people into the effort. I was very pleased that [Dean] Andy Boynton and [Provost] David Quigley got what I’m doing and were willing to back me. There’s always a little bit of risk when you’re affiliated with someone who’s trying something new and different; it’s much easier to stick on the well-trodden path. But people here at BC really get it, and it’s great to have that support when you want to go out and innovate.

How does your work fit into a business school’s finance department?

PR: It’s a very natural set of questions to ask here, because companies have long grappled with how large numbers of people can interact with financial and other information in safe, trustworthy ways. More generally, people in finance are active researchers, and I want to test these new tools in real research scenarios. My work draws on many different disciplines, and I’ve found the perfect home here in the Seidner Department, where I can collaborate with colleagues who are experts in business analytics, organizational behavior, and how people interact.

So much of your career is focused on the economics of ideas—what is your personal take on ideas?

PR: One of the things I most want to convey to both my colleagues and my students is just how satisfying the world of ideas can be. It’s so satisfying to learn something new—like at 63, I decided to learn how to write computer programs. It took a while, but I get great satisfaction out of coding these days. I also read history, and I spend quite a bit of time thinking about where humans are going in the next century or millennium. There’s something nourishing about being committed to ideas, and it’s too bad so many people get discouraged by rough patches in their own interactions with ideas. I hope my work helps more people discover not just how to contribute [to], but how to enjoy the world of ideas.

How do you relate to BC’s Jesuit, Catholic identity?

PR: Though I don’t come from a Catholic background, I appreciate that people here are attentive to issues like purpose, mission, and reflection. These are often lost in the day-to-day shuffle but are crucial for protecting valuable things like science, and also just for living a good life. Far too many people fail to appreciate the personal benefits of committing to something larger than ourselves. If all we’re committed to is ourselves, we end up undermining ourselves; we do things that don’t work, we aren’t happy, we’re stuck on the treadmill. Reflection is part of how we watch out for that. I was pleased to see that here at Boston College, people are comfortable talking about purpose and mission, and as a result, they haven’t lost it. And so, I’m happier here at BC than I’ve been in quite some time.