Hon Degree

Enterprise Board Member Given Honorary Degree

[Posted on 22 July 2003]

Dr Magelli, who is the Director of the Office of Strategic Business Initiatives at the University of Illinois, was born in Illinois at the height of the Great Depression. His capacity for hard work and entrepreneurialism showed itself early – by the age of 14 he owned a 24 per cent share in seven supermarkets across Illinois. At the age of 27, he left his business and enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign where he majored in Economics, then stayed on to do a PhD in the subject.

His thesis, published in 1965, was a groundbreaking study of the complex economic environment in which higher education operates. He demonstrated the link between a society's ability to generate wealth and the capacity of its universities to create and communicate knowledge. He also argued that for a society to achieve its full economic potential, it must invest in providing access to a first-class university education to everyone who is able to benefit from it, regardless of their ability to pay.

In 1989, Dr Magelli was given the task of re-engineering the MBA Programme at the University of Illinois in a way that enabled it to become independent of state funding. The Illinois MBA programme is now one of the top 50 in the world and Dr Magelli leads its highly successful business consultancy operation.