NEW ORLEANS – Tulane University business professor Peter Ricchiuti has donated $250,000 to the A.B. Freeman School of Business for an endowed fund that will help launch the Ricchiuti Action Learning Initiative.
The goal of RALI is to promote education outside the classroom by providing instructors with resources to develop and enrich their courses beyond traditional teaching methods, said Ricchiuti. Faculty members will be able to use RALI funds for student travel, guest speakers, career development initiatives and other activities associated with action learning.
“It’s rare that a professor while serving as a member of the faculty endows an initiative like this, so we owe Peter a tremendous debt of gratitude,” said Freeman School Dean Ira Solomon. “RALI will enable faculty members to take concepts and theories from the classroom and test them in the complex and dirty real world to see how they play out. Burkenroad is probably our best-known example, but there are courses throughout the school that involve action learning, and we’re currently working to develop additional ones. This type of education provides very powerful learning outcomes and is a growing feature of the Freeman School educational experience.”
“And RALI is the perfect name,” said Ricchiuti. “I love that it sounds Italian.”
Earlier in his Tulane career, Ricchiuti applied for a Board of Regents grant to launch a program that would promote Louisiana business by having students write investment reports on public companies in the state. The program became Burkenroad Reports, the Freeman School’s acclaimed student equity analysis program, and Ricchiuti, who served as the program’s research director, quickly became a go-to expert on Louisiana business and a nationally recognized market commentator.
With the success of Burkenroad, Ricchiuti helped make Freeman a pioneer in business action learning. In the program’s wake, action learning became an increasingly significant part of the Freeman educational experience. The Darwin Fenner Student Managed Fund, for example, was established to enable students to practice portfolio management by actively investing $5.8 million in Tulane endowment funds spread across three equity portfolios.
As Ricchiuti prepares to begin his 35th year at Tulane, he hopes to help build RALI into a fund big enough to support every faculty member’s action learning needs.
“Our students have always had a reputation for two things,” he said. “They’re really nice people, and they can hit the ground running and add value on day one. For a lot of them, it was Burkenroad that made it possible, so I think they’d be more than happy to give a little something back and help the next generation of students get their foot in the door.”
