There were cheers, tears, and embraces between classmates when generations of School of Management alumnae gathered at Simmons on September 17 to celebrate the 90th birthday of Dr. Anne Jardim ’13HD.
Some had not seen one another in years. For others, it was their first time back at Simmons since their Graduate School of Management days. The celebration also connected what Jardim and Margaret Hennig ’62, EM, began more than 50 years ago with what the School of Management is building today.
Anita Busquets ’80MBA found herself returning to one word as she prepared her remarks: trailblazers.
“Anne, you and Margaret were true trailblazers,” Busquets told Jardim. “The program you began that fall of 1974 changed our lives, all of our lives, so we would leave Simmons also to blaze new trails.”
Those early students came from fields including teaching, nursing, and physical and occupational therapy, Busquets recalled, and most had little background in business. Jardim and Hennig taught them to approach organizations with curiosity, intellect, collaboration, and, above all, confidence.
The influence reached later classes as well. Koren Phillips ’10MBA deliberately chose Simmons because of its focus on women and principled leadership. There, she found “a thoughtful, supportive, encouraging, and brilliant cohort of faculty, friends, and classmates.”
“It has been a transformative part of my career journey,” Phillips said, “and I am delighted to return to a community with so many who hold this place dear.”
Trustee and GSM alumna April Evans ’91MBA sees a connection between the School’s beginnings and its direction today. Jardim, Hennig, and then-President William Holmes “had the courage to do something that had never been done before,” Evans said in an interview before the celebration. “There was no marketing test for this.”
‘We Are Because You Are’
President Lynn Perry Wooten placed Jardim’s contributions in the context of work that remains to be done.
Women have made significant gains in leadership, she said, but barriers remain, including the “broken rung” that can limit advancement from the earliest stages of a career.
“Equity is not simply about opening doors,” Wooten said. “It is about ensuring our students have the education, skills, resources, and confidence to walk through those doors—and the ability to open them for others.”
She then drew on the African philosophy of Ubuntu, often expressed as “I am because you are.”
Looking around the room at generations of School of Management alumnae, Wooten told Jardim, “Your legacy lives in every woman whose possibilities became greater because of this community you helped to create.”
“So, Anne, we are because you are.”
Wooten ended with a challenge to carry that work forward.
“Perhaps the greatest way we can honor you is to continue what you started,” she said. “We should open more doors. We should think about how we can personally strengthen that rung so that it’s not broken. We should think about what we want to make possible for the next generation.”
36 Then. 36 Now.
Dean of the School of Management Astrid Sheil then turned to the School today.
Sheil described spending much of her first years as dean learning its history. Jardim and former SOM Dean Deborah Merrill-Sands, she said, met with her numerous times, “filled in the blank spots, and helped me to envision a new pathway forward based on the bedrock of the original graduate program, and focused on the future-ready needs of today’s students and beyond.”
Sheil announced that the new Master of Science in Management had launched that semester with 36 students.
The number was not lost on Jardim.
“We started with 36 students,” she later said. “And that was back in 1974.”
The new MSM combines foundational study in accounting, finance, marketing, and management with economics, project management, generative AI, and data analysis. Students may also pursue a concentration or certificate in Nonprofit Management or Business and Leadership in Women’s Sports. The latter is the first graduate program in the nation dedicated to the business of women’s professional sports. Thirty of the inaugural 36 students are pursuing the women’s sports focus.
Sheil also credited the team behind the new program, including Professor of Practice Justine Pouravelis, for helping develop the curriculum, hire faculty, and enroll students.
“Getting the graduate program designed required that my team and I move at industry speed,” she said.
For Sheil, the School’s next chapter also depends on reconnecting with its alumnae. Her vision includes creating more opportunities for them to engage with students in classes and through University programs.
“We need you. I need you,” Sheil told them, “and believe that together we will continue to produce outcomes greater than the sum of their parts.”
The industries and students’ needs have changed since 1974. But the underlying idea is familiar: understand what students need to lead in a changing world and create a program that responds.
‘The Biggest Thing I Feel Proud of Is You’
When Jardim took the podium, she looked out at women who had been part of the School she and Hennig began more than half a century earlier.
She recalled the program’s beginnings in two former typing classrooms, with students donating furniture for a common room because there was no money to furnish it.
“Nobody complained. Nobody,” Jardim said. “We were doing the best we could.”
The faculty taught classes while running the new program, raising money, consulting, and, in Jardim and Hennig’s case, writing the book that would become the New York Times bestseller The Managerial Woman.
But at 90, Jardim said the accomplishment that meant the most was sitting before her.
“All these years later, the biggest thing that I can look back on that I feel really proud of is you,” she said. “What you have done.”
“All of you, in whichever way you’ve done it, proved that we did know what we were doing. And that, at this age, is the most extraordinary comfort.”
Alumnae also marked the occasion by supporting the next generation of SOM students. Former SOM faculty member Cynthia Ingols, Joan Tomaceski ’91MBA, and Trustee Charlotte Streat ’00MBA shared a fundraising initiative, the Anne Jardim Scholarship Fund, which has raised $90,000 to help the School recruit students in 2027.
Before the room broke into “Happy Birthday,” Jardim returned once more to the institution she helped shape.
“This is your institution,” she told the alumnae.
Then came her charge: “Help us go from this point to where we really become a place where women can look, and see, and find, and learn, and pass it on.”
