HTM Selects New Department Head
After an exhaustive international search that yielded a number of highly qualified candidates, the Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management has selected a new head. Richard Ghiselli will return to Purdue to assume the position on July 1, 2009. For the last two years, Dr. Ghiselli has served as director of the School of Hotel and Restaurant Administration at Oklahoma State University. Before that, he was associate department head in HTM.
“The faculty and staff are very excited that Dr. Ghiselli has agreed to be our department head. His understanding of our culture, his experience, his industry contacts, and his CHRIE activities are just what we need to continue our tradition of excellence and evolve into a premier international program,” said Doug Nelson, associate department head. “I believe very strongly in HTM; the department has a great staff, outstanding students, and a committed staff, " said Dr. Ghiselli, a father of four who is returning to West Lafayette with his wife and youngest child. “It really is an opportunity that I relish, that I feel very grateful to have.”
A Chicago native, Dr. Ghiselli began his hospitality career working various positions in Chicago-area restaurants. His first degree was an AOS in culinary arts from the Culinary Institute of America. He went on to earn a BS in philosophy from the University of Illinois, then master’s and PhD degrees in restaurant, hotel, and institutional management from Purdue University. After completing his doctorate, Dr. Ghiselli took a faculty position in the Department of Human and Family Resources at Northern Illinois University. In 1993, he was lured back to Purdue, where he was part of the faculty for 13 years. During that time he directed the Arthur C. Avery Foodservice Research Laboratory, focusing his research on job satisfaction and turnover in the workplace, QOL, workplace behaviors, managerial behavior and ethics, performance evaluation (managerial and employee), the relationship between training and performance, consumer needs and expectations in foodservice, and food safety cost-benefit analysis.
In 2000, he received the department’s Bruce Lazarus Undergraduate Teaching Award. In 2002, he received a Best Paper Award at the Annual Council on Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Education (CHRIE) Conference in Orlando, Florida. Dr. Ghiselli is a member of the American Culinary Federation; Club Managers Association of America; Council on Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Education; Gamma Sigma Delta; and the National Restaurant Association. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Quality Assurance in Hospitality & Tourism. Speaking from his Oklahoma State office in mid-April, Dr. Ghiselli said he was hesitant to suggest any specific initiatives for HTM. “I really need to discuss these with faculty and staff and find out their ideas first,” he said. But, keeping in mind the department’s strategic plan and recently revised curriculum, he envisions a future department that is focused on technology, diversity, community service, and research. “I’m very concerned about technology, that we stay current with the industry standards. It’s very hard to predict what students will be doing in 2013, but we need to try as much as possible to make sure that what we do in the classroom reflects the impact that technology will have on the workplace,” he said. “There is an industry shift toward e-commerce. When we schedule flights, we do everything online; we can even choose our seats, our times. The hotel and restaurant industries are moving in that way as well; from your PDA you can make reservations for dinner, find restaurants, and read menus.”
Customer demographics also are changing. Along with language and cultural differences, the hospitality and tourism industries are experiencing an upsurge in older adult consumers. “Students graduating today are going to see more seniors than any other group has ever seen,” Dr. Ghiselli said. “Seniors are staying in hotels and eating out. That is a huge market.” Many older adults also are foregoing retirement to stay in the workplace longer. That brings its own challenges to recent graduates. “One of my students returned after graduation to tell me that she was in charge of a group of people from different generations, and she was initially uncomfortable being an older person’s supervisor,” Dr. Ghiselli said. “It took her awhile to acclimate to that.”
Service learning both at home and abroad is an important issue as well; today’s corporations are increasingly focused on the communities in which they operate. “When I taught quantity foodservice, we engaged in community projects, where we took food to homeless shelters and prepared meals,” he said. “Today, service learning is becoming part of many classes in some way, shape, or form.” Information literacy is another key component for hospitality and tourism management education. Today’s undergraduates are tech-savvy, but must learn how to judge the quality of information they find online; that issue is being addressed in a new information literacy requirement for HTM freshmen. “Everything’s out there on the Internet now; evaluation is critical, getting good information, and checking the reliability of the sources,” he said. A related issue is graduate-level research. Graduate students who engage in high-quality, meaningful studies today will be the educational leaders of tomorrow. In recent years, many of HTM’s PhD students have distinguished themselves at national and international conferences. “Purdue has done a wonderful job of producing superb researchers, and that has to continue,” he said.
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