Why boxes of journals are headed to Ethiopia

Bruce Lamont's office features cleared shelves and dozens of packed boxes.

But he isn't going anywhere. He's sending his academic journals on a benevolent 8,000-mile journey to a new home.

Lamont, chair of the College of Business' Department of Management and the director of research at the Jim Moran Institute for Global Entrepreneurship, is donating his four-decades-long collection of journals to Addis Ababa University's College of Business and Economics, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The donation marks Lamont's way of honoring and helping a business school in one of the world's poorest countries.

"I see it as a way to help their faculty know what research has been done and what is currently being done so that they can find a way to be successful in publishing in higher-education journals, just like everybody else," said Lamont, who is also the Jim Moran Eminent Scholar in Business Administration.

Lamont, editor of the Africa Journal of Management and a member of the Africa Academy of Management, said he always has found himself impressed with the work and dedication of faculty members of business schools during his travels throughout the continent. He took note of significant disadvantages for many instructors and researchers, including a lack of library facilities and internet access to academic books and journals.

At the same time, he had amassed a stockpile of academic journals that he'd been collecting over the last 40 years. They included Administrative Science Quarterly, the Global Strategy Journal, the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review and the Journal of International Business Studies, among others.

"I'd been collecting journals all my career, but I'd been asking myself, 'Why am I doing this when I have electronic access to all of them?'" Lamont said. "I just said, 'I really need to send them to a school in Africa.'"

He happened to get a recent visit from College of Business alumnus William Ritchie (MBA '91; PhD Strategic Management '01), now the CSX Professor of Business Management at James Madison University, based in Harrisonburg, Va.

Lamont said he and Ritchie discussed their common interest in Africa, and Ritchie mentioned that he teaches a supply-chain class that sends health supplies to Ethiopia, with help from nonprofit organizations that cover shipping costs. 

Lamont asked Ritchie if he could get his journals on one of the shipments if he could find a business school that would take them. 

"He said, 'Absolutely. If you can get them up to James Madison, I can get them to Ethiopia,'" Lamont said.

As for a taker of the journals, Lamont likewise got a yes from Addis Ababa University's College of Business and Economics, which produces the Ethiopian Journal of Business and Economics and boasts a growing library of digital and hard-copy academic materials, including textbooks, reference books and journals. Shewaye Yiheyis, head librarian at the College of Business and Economics, said in an email that she considered the journals "very significant for our college."

"We salute Professor Lamont for his efforts to advance business education and research for students and faculty members at Florida State University and anywhere else he can, especially in Africa," said Michael Hartline, dean of the College of Business. "Professor Lamont's donation establishes another global connection for the College of Business and provides one more example of why our faculty members are known and respected all over the world."

Lamont plans to get the boxes of journals – 80 of them as of late February – to James Madison University after FSU's spring break in mid-March, perhaps via a small moving van. He has received additional donations of academic books and journals from faculty members in several college departments, he said.

Other faculty members who would like to donate can contact Lamont or Andrea White, assistant to the dean and senior administrative specialist.

Referring to Legacy Hall, the state-of-the-art future home on which the college plans to break ground in the fall, Lamont said, "This may be a good way to clear our offices before the big move." 

-- Pete Reinwald