1917: Harry C. Bentley
1917: Jennie Belle Bentley
1918: Henry Rauch
1940: Rae Anderson
1948: Albert Brown
1949: E. William Dandes
1953: Maurice Lindsay
1960: G. Frank Smith
1961: Marion Graham Willis
1961: Thomas Morison
1962: Al Shields
1971: Gregory Adamian
1971: Dorothy Willard
1976: W. Michael Hoffman
1977: Hugh Dysart
1980: Barbara Paul Emile

The author of several important accounting texts and histories of accounting, Harry Bentley was also a man of varied interests.  He played baseball and wrestled as a youth and enjoyed tumbling — he was even known to do so on the Boston Common!  He was an avid Boston Braves fan and occasionally dismissed classes for Opening Day. He collected art and oriental rugs and owned several paintings by his friend Edward Hopper. Harry C. Bentley served as president of the school until his retirement in 1953. He died in North Carolina in 1967, at the age of 90.

Henry Rauch, and later his family, were magnanimous donors to the college. He made one of the first million dollar gifts to Bentley, creating a fund to advance faculty research, which today supports doctoral students. Bentley granted its first honorary degree to him in 1980, and the Rauch Administration Center building, dedicated in 1987, still honors his legacy today.

Educated at Radcliffe, Tufts, and B.U., Marion Graham Willis was a trailblazer for women at Bentley. She joined the faculty as a part-time instructor in 1961, and in 1962 became the first woman to teach full-time at Bentley. She was one of only a few female faculty members who taught on the original Boston campus, before Bentley began active recruitment of female students and staff.

In 1974, Willis became the first female professor to receive tenure. She is known to have felt great satisfaction in teaching courses at Bentley and watching the English department evolve. Willis retired from the faculty in 1994.

Elwood (Al) N. Shields first came to Bentley in 1962 to coach basketball, the school’s first varsity sport after skiing, and was such a successful coach that he was named “Coach of the Year” by several athletic organizations. A year later, he established Bentley’s Athletic Department and served as its first director until his retirement in 1991. He was instrumental in the change of Bentley’s mascot from the Beaver to the Falcon in 1963, and he was a strong voice in choosing blue and gold as the institution’s colors in the same year.  Al Shields was inducted into the Bentley Athletic Hall of Fame in 1984.

Dorothy Willard was a pioneer for women in the accounting profession.  She was a graduate of Boston University and worked in public accounting and eventually became a partner at the Boston firms of Charles F. Rittenhouse & Company and Touche Ross.  Willard was the first woman to serve as president of the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA).

She joined the Bentley Board of Trustees in 1971 as its first female member, and in the same year was awarded an Honorary Membership to the Bentley Alumni Association for her commitment to the school. Willard served on the Board until her death in 1983; the business school at B.U. today confers the Dorothy G. Willard Award to the top female MBA student.

Barbara H. Paul-Emile has shaped generations of Bentley students since joining the faculty in 1980.  She was appointed the Maurice E. Goldman Distinguished Chair in Arts and Sciences in 2001 and in 1984 became the first African-American professor to receive tenure.  Her expertise and enthusiasm in the classroom have won her numerous tributes, including the Adamian Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Massachusetts Professor of the Year Award from the Carnegie Foundation and the Council for the Advancement of Education.

Dr. Paul-Emile’s innovative pedagogy has included many study tours to Europe, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. She is well known for her creative writing in several genres and for her scholarship on 19^th-century English literature and Caribbean literature.

Susan Schwab became Bentley’s first female vice president when President Adamian appointed her VP of Information Systems in 1991, after holding several positions in the I.T. area. As VP, Schwab made essential contributions to Bentley’s preeminence in the use of technology in business education, especially true during the presidency of Joseph Morone, when Bentley was established as the Business School for the Information Age.

Bentley’s fifth president was a distinguished academic leader with experience as a teacher, advocate, author, administrator and chief executive.  After graduating from Harvard with a BA and MA, he taught in public schools before earning an EdD from Stanford.  Dr. Cronin served as Massachusetts’ first secretary of Educational Affairs, and then as head of the Illinois State Board of Education.

An acknowledged expert in educational financing, he returned to Massachusetts to lead the Massachusetts Higher Education Assistance Corporation and became Bentley’s president in 1991.  Dr. Cronin was a tireless champion of internationalism and student advising, and The Cronin International Center and the Cronin Advising Award recognize his contributions to Bentley today.

Joseph Morone became Bentley’s president in 1997 following a varied career in government, industry, and higher education.  A graduate of Hamilton College, he earned a PhD in political science from Yale University.  He served as a White House science advisor and as an executive at General Electric before coming to Bentley from RPI, where he had been dean of the Lally School of Management and Technology.

Dr. Morone positioned Bentley as the Business School for the Information Age by establishing high-tech teaching and learning centers like the CMT, expanding the Trading Room, and infusing technology into the curriculum more deeply.   He also oversaw significant physical growth, acquiring 53 acres by adding the DeVincent Farm and the Army Corps of Engineers property. New construction under Morone’s tenure included the Student Center and the Smith Academic Technology Center, and the doctoral program was established in 2005.