Two faculty members in the Eastern Kentucky University School of Business have been awarded an endowed professorship and chair.
Dr. Allen Engle, professor of management, has been named the Harold Glenn Campbell Chair in International Business; and Dr. Lee Allison, assistant professor of marketing, has been awarded the Karl D. Bays Professorship in Business.
“The generosity of our donors is vitally important in attracting and retaining qualified faculty to EKU’s School of Business,” said College of Business and Technology Dean Dr. Thomas Erekson.
Engle, who earned two degrees from Eastern, joined the EKU faculty in 1989, and in 2013 was named an EKU Foundation Professor, the University’s highest honor for excellence in teaching, service and research. He is also a recipient of the EKU International Alumni Association’s Excellence in Teaching Award and served as chair of the Faculty Senate 1993-94. His father, Fred Allen Engle Jr., taught at Eastern from 1959 to 1998, and his grandfather, Fred Allen Engle Sr., taught at Eastern from 1928 to 1963. By 2018, the Engles will have taught, without interruption, at EKU for 90 years.
Campbell, a 1973 EKU graduate, built successful careers in banking and insurance, while working diligently to bring economic development to his native Owsley County. He retired as president and CEO of Farmers State Bank of Booneville, but continues in the role of investor. Campbell also serves as director of Campbell’s Insurance Agency in Booneville. He is a former director of both the Middlefork Financial Group in Booneville and First Security Bank in Lexington.
He has remained active with his alma mater since earning his bachelor’s degree in health education. Campbell was inducted into EKU’s Hall of Distinguished Alumni in 1993 and awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University in 1998. He established the Harold G. Campbell/Farmers State Bank Scholarship in 1992 and the Harold Glenn Campbell Chair in International Business in 2004.
The Harold Glenn Campbell Chair in International Business, for three years and renewable, was established to support activities and initiatives related to international business and provide annual support for a tenured professor (either a new faculty position or a salary supplement to an existing position) and associated costs such as start-up costs, salaries, benefits, travel and other professional expenses.
“I am most grateful to Mr. Campbell for his most generous donations to EKU and the School of Business over the years,” Engle said. “His career and commitment to eastern Kentucky ... provide a powerful testimony to how grit, determination, vision and entrepreneurial spirit can impact the lives of very many fellow Kentuckians. Mr. Campbell recognized early on that global interdependence was the wave of the future and that Eastern students must acquire the experiences, skills and perspectives to thrive in this new global marketplace.”
When Engle began doing research on international topics in the early 1990s, “the unstated policy at Eastern was not to fund international travel. We have come a long way since then. The EKU Foundation and my department chair, Dr. Lana Carnes, have been very supportive of my international efforts for some time now.”
Engle said the Chair in International Business distinction will help him “bring new and more relevant insights and resources to our students. In addition to teaching the senior-level course in international management, I attempt to include significant international and cross-cultural content to the advanced human resources courses that I teach. We are rapidly approaching the point that all business taught at universities will be international business, and distinctions between domestic management practices and international management practices will be minimized. Dean Erekson’s ongoing efforts to deliver the resources required to enhance our programs and make a difference in the lives of our students are much appreciated by the faculty.”
Bays, a Corbin native, attended Eastern on a football scholarship and earned a bachelor’s degree in general business in 1955. After serving in the Marines, he joined American Hospital Supply Company as a sales representative. He was named president of the firm in 1970, CEO in 1971 and chairman of the board in 1974. In 1985, the company was acquired by Baxter Travenol Laboratories, which he served as chairman. In 1987, he was named CEO and chairman of Institutional Industries, which was renamed Whitman Corporation in 1988. He served as director until his untimely death in 1989.
Also a director of Amoco Corp., Delta Airlines and the American Productivity Center, Bays received the Horatio Alger Award and the University of Southern California School of Business Administration Award for Business Excellence. He was named outstanding chief executive officer in the hospital supply industry five times by the Wall Street Journal and Financial World magazine. Like Campbell, he is a member of the EKU Hall of Distinguished Alumni (1974) and earned an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from his alma mater (1977).
The Bays Professorship, also for three years and renewable, was established to reward an emerging scholar with interests in leadership, management and sales.
“As I join the EKU Management, Marketing and International Business ‘Earn Excellence’ tradition and team, I am humbled by the great honor of this appointment,” Allison said. “I especially appreciate that the ‘Earn Excellence’ mantra ‘Engage, Examine, Expand and Emerge’ is fully consistent with the way Mr. Bays lived his life, and with his objectives in establishing the award. He loved Kentucky and EKU so much that a plaque hung in his office that read, ‘If you lead a good life, go to Sunday School and church, and say your prayers every night, when you die you’ll go to Kentucky.’ Granted, I skipped the wait, but I’m thrilled to be here, and I believe Mr. Bays would approve.”
Allison earned two degrees from the University of Texas at El Paso and her doctoral degree in business administration-marketing from the Spears School of Business at Oklahoma State University. Her primary research interests include strategy, sales management, salesperson brand relationships and salesperson control systems, as well as emerging markets and digital marketing.
Her passion for teaching sales was fueled by a career working with Anheuser-Busch distributors in the El Paso area, west Texas and southeastern New Mexico. Allison’s doctoral dissertation was titled “Investigating Firm Level Drivers of Salesperson Brand Identification, and her work has been published in Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management and in Industrial Marketing Management.
Inset photos: Dr. Lee Allison (top) and Karl Bays (bottom)