Del Alamo/Hogan Symposium on Business Ethics

Retired Alcoa executive Bill O’Rourke discussed doing business in Russia as well as other ethical challenges as the featured speaker of the Del Alamo/Hogan Symposium on Business Ethics, hosted last fall by the Pamplin College of Business.

O’Rourke founded Alcoa’s operations in Russia and was president of Alcoa–Russia from 2005 to 2008. He also led Alcoa’s worldwide safety and health operations, considered among the best in the world, and held other senior leadership positions in the company.

The symposium is sponsored by the Business Leadership Center of the Department of Management and by Pamplin accounting alumni Robert F. Hogan Jr. (ACCT ’78, MACCT ’80), and Jorge Del Alamo Jr. (ACCT ’69), and his wife, Lin.

Additional support for the symposium was provided by Cherry Bekaert and Grant Thornton.

BB&T Distinguished Lecture

Robert J. Barro, the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University, gave the BB&T Distinguished Lecture talk, “The Job-Filled Non-Recovery.” The event was hosted by the Pamplin College of Business and part of its BB&T Distinguished Lecture Series on Capitalism.

Barro is also a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The BB&T lecture series is part of a Pamplin teaching program to explore the foundations of capitalism and freedom. The program’s undergraduate and graduate courses examine alternative economic systems, including socialism and communism, and compare them with the economic solutions offered by free markets. The program was established in 2007 in the college’s finance department with a $1 million gift from BB&T Charitable Foundation