CONTENTS

Features

12 Fundamental Figures: All due credit to women who have shaped Bentley for 80 years and counting

20 Cultivating Potential: Alumni find opportunity and challenge in the cannabis industry Departments

3 News from the Nest: A multicultural makeover, the world as a classroom and more

8 Forward Thinking: President Chrite on why colleges must embrace disagreement and debate

9 Five Things: Human skills that AI can’t replace . . . yet

10 Take Two: e new rules of (employee) engagement

24 A Force for Bentley: Donors honor a mentor and invest in first-generation students

36 The PROfile: Bringing the outdoors in with designer Julie Sousa ’17

38 Trending: Alumni expertise in real estate to plot your next move

39 Family Matters: A happy reunion becomes a thriving business

40 Inside Job: Translating a book into chocolate 26

Prepare to meet some remarkable Bentley women. Our cover story features four whose talent with numbers and infinite determination brought them to this accounting school on Boylston Street, newly coeducational as of 1941. Elizabeth McAuliffe ’45, Rosaline ’48 and Eunice ’51 Berkowitz, and Mary (Durgin) Kline ’48 recall those early days with still-vibrant affection and pride.

“Hearing these stories that no one had asked about in a very, very long time was just magic,” reports Kristin Livingston, who invited two current students along to talk with Mary at home in Virginia.

With coeducation, Bentley seized on changes reshaping the world and American society in the 1940s. Decades earlier, the school founded to professionalize the field of accounting was primed for the rollout of a federal income tax. In the 1960s, students’ calls for a 24/7 college experience spurred construction of a campus in Waltham. And the list goes on.

Innovation and adaptation have stayed constants here. Consider the evidence to follow, including news of an expanded Multicultural Center, best practices for recruiting Gen Z employees and a management professor’s take on the limits of artificial intelligence. The entrepreneurial spirit that drives so many Falcons features prominently in “Cultivating Potential.”