The School of Business will roll out a new major, minor and concentrations as part of its strategic management and public policy program this fall.
The SMPP program, which GWSB faculty began planning in fall 2025 and officially approved at the school’s January faculty meeting, features undergraduate major, minor and concentration options to provide students with a program that studies the intersection of management and politics. Faculty said the new program will build on existing coursework in GWSB, including business ethics, sustainability and management courses, while also providing students with more room to take non-business elective courses like in political science.
All three forms of the program — an SMPP major, minor and concentration — include existing traditional business classes but also require students to take political science, sustainability or international development courses.
Voni Pamphile, an associate professor who helped form the program, said she and other faculty at GWSB had previously heard students express interest in a program that studies both business and politics which led them to create the program. She said the program is something the department has been talking about for a few years and formally started the process of establishing the program in fall 2025.
“Students need to know about business, government, society,” Pamphile said. “They’re not separate domains, they’re really intertwined. So we’re in a really good position, we’re a unique department, not many business schools have an SMPP department.”
Pamphile said the University is in a “really good position” for the program because faculty members’ expertise and GW’s location in the District allow students to see the world change at the intersection of business and politics in the nation’s capital.
“We’re preparing students to lead in a very complex environment, and a huge goal of GW is preparing the future leaders of the world,” Pamphile said. “So I think we’re definitely adding to the overall goals of GW.”
Joel Gehman, a professor and chair of the strategic management and public policy department, said faculty were able to gain a sense of where students’ interests lie because many of them serve as advisors to student organizations within the school, which led to the program’s formation. He said that the University has a “very active” student body and they saw an interest they wanted to remain attentive to.
Gehman said there is currently no additional budget impact of the program because it is built up through many existing courses like markets and politics. He said the program will require more teaching resources, but will self-fund as student interest and demand increase.
Gehman said the program will help provide students with more opportunities to take a diverse set of coursework like corporate sustainability strategy and human rights and ethics. He also said the program will help reach goals for demonstrating the school’s research has real-world impact by combining the two fields.
“I think this is also another opportunity to bring the best of what we’re doing from the research perspective into the classroom, and potentially engage the next generation some people I hope will become researchers and scholars in their own right,” Gehman said.
