Chairman of the Board John Yena ’06 Hon. once remarked that hospitality at Johnson & Wales didn’t start with a bang, just a few courses added to business in 1972. It’s heard throughout the world now, the largest hospitality educator in the US with more than 4,099 students preparing for the 1.6 million new jobs the industry anticipates by 2012.

Its first two degrees were associates in hotel and restaurant and travel-tourism management. Subjects included economics, statistics and accounting, and a food preparation course was taught out of a book, augmented by a tour of a local cafeteria.

When Peter Van Kleek, a teacher and administrator, arrived a few years later, “he made a name for the term hospitality,” says Caroline Cooper, EdD, former dean of hospitality, now with the Alan Shawn Feinstein Graduate School. “At that time, everybody just called it hotel management or hotel restaurant management, but he said, ‘No, it’s this clustering of travel and tourism, hotel, recreation and leisure, and the management of food.’”

Van Kleek recognized that hospitality is a service industry, and revolutionized the concept of what the business of hotel, airlines and restaurants was all about. “In those days, nobody thought about customer service,” recalls Cooper. “Today, everyone, even people in operations and industrial management, think about customer service.”

This new definition fed directly into Johnson & Wales’ experiential education. With university-owned hotels, restaurants and a travel agency, students put the theory learned in classes right to work.

Van Kleek’s vision helped position Johnson & Wales as a leader in global education. He traveled to India in the early 1980s to establish a relationship with Taj Hotels. Partnerships in Switzerland were also formed which led to student exchanges. “Back then, Swiss hotel schools were thought of as the best,” reminisces Cooper. “Historically, if you had a Swiss general manager in your hotel then you had the epitome of protocol.”

After establishing The Hospitality College in 1990, Johnson & Wales further solidified its reputation by hosting a meeting of hotel school directors from 30 countries. A New York Times article reported that, “… the coffee served on the first day tasted weak to most foreign delegates, used to more potent concoctions back home. The next day, after Johnson & Wales doubled the amount of coffee used in brewing, conference participants were astonished … remarking that if that had happened in their countries, it would have taken a week to change things.”

Curriculum around the mid-90s continued responding to its active industry advisory council — including experts from leading corporations such as Marriott, Interstate Hotels and Prudential — by covering subjects like managing quality services, hospitality human resources and diversity leadership. A course in media relations was the first of its kind and still offered. Documentary filmmaker, Michael Moore recently spoke to a class in North Miami.

In 1999, The Hospitality College introduced a degree in sports/entertainment/event management (SEE). “This was a direct response to industry telling us that nobody is really educating young people who want to go into these areas,” says Dick Brush, now dean of The Hospitality College at the Providence Campus. His responsibilities when he joined JWU in 1986 included upgrading college-owned training facilities: The Rhode Island Inn (now the Radisson) and adjacent restaurant J. Wales (now Legal Sea Foods), both in Warwick, RI Cooper remembers a meeting in then University Hall with the head of the Providence Performing Arts Center, the head of the RI Convention Center, a New England Patriots representative and others. “And so we had them all in one room and told them we were trying to figure out if it should be one degree or multiples, and we talked about skills required, and they told us it’s all one degree.” The experts also said it needed to be a bachelor’s; hence the first hospitality major that students entered into for four years from the start.

Last year, hospitality, like business, eliminated associate degrees. In addition to SEE, current bachelor’s degrees include Hotel & Lodging Management; Restaurant, Food & Beverage Management and Travel-Tourism & Hospitality Management. After completing one year in any hospitality major, students may apply to enter International Hotel & Tourism Management.

Brush notes that JWU reflects the dynamism of the industry and the world. As the Internet makes extinct the traditional role of travel agents, for example, travel-tourism majors prepare to become directors of tourism, destination managers and convention and visitor’s bureau marketing directors. Technology applications continue to grow across the curriculum, as when hotel students explore revenue management, the technique used by hotels and airlines to adjust pricing based on demand.

A major curriculum change early in this decade led to greater electives. These options allow students to choose from more than a dozen concentrations such as Adventure, Sport and Nature-Based Tourism, Casino & Gaming Operations and Sales & Meetings Management and almost any concentration meshes with almost any major.

John A. Kelley III ’10, of Laurel, Md., concentrates in entrepreneurship. “It helps broaden my background to better understand the language of investment and business proposals,” he allows. He credits courses in real estate, business planning and diversified management for his recent promotion to front desk manager at The Westin Providence. “I’m going into my senior year at JWU and have already achieved a management level position with a full-service hotel.”

Conversational Spanish became a requirement for most hospitality students two years ago. “It was long overdue,” Brush admits. “We realized that we were doing a disservice by not giving them foreign language skills.”

But the change that excites Brush most is the introduction of the bachelor’s programs in Culinary Arts and Food Service Management (CA-FSM) and Baking & Pastry Arts and Food Service Management (BPA-FSM). “We have a world-class hospitality college and a world-class college of culinary arts, but until now we did very little to combine the strengths of each,” he says. Traditionally, students who earned an associate degree from the College of Culinary Arts could opt to earn a bachelor’s in food service management. The two, however, were seen as separate entities. Now they’re operated jointly, and the four-year program allows students more advanced cooking along with the management, accounting, finance and marketing to be successful business people.