Jim Wilburn has been a Church of Christ minister, an adviser to Russian President Boris Yeltsin and, for the last 44 years, a pioneer in helping establish Pepperdine’s Malibu campus, heading up both its business school and School of Public Policy.
Now, Wilburn is calling it a career, handing over his title as Dean of Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy on August 1.
“In his four decades of service, Jim Wilburn has proven his dedication and capacity to lead over and over again,” said Pepperdine University President Andrew K. Benton. “Everything we’ve asked him to do, including service to five Pepperdine presidents, he’s done very well.”
Wilburn helped introduce capitalism to Russia, serving as an adviser to President Boris Yeltsin. From 1991 to 1996, he served as co-chair of the U.S. Committee to Assist Russian Reform, a program funded by the U.S. Department of State and authorized by Boris Yeltsin.
“I was invited by the prime minister of Russia to put together a committee of business leaders to serve as advisors to Russia on privatizing and trying to move from a communized economy to a free-market economy,” he told Pepperdine’s campus magazine in 2011. “They asked me to look at three areas: housing for the soldiers coming back from the end of the Cold War with nowhere to live, food distribution, and tourism. My last few meetings there were actually inside the Kremlin in Boris Yeltsin’s office, so that was obviously an exciting time to be there.”
He was also a pioneer in the field of adult, mid-career education. The notion was originally dismissed by many major universities that focused on traditional undergraduate and graduate studies. Today, most major universities provide classes and other resources for professionals seeking new training or looking to make a career move.
During Wilburn’s years as Dean of the Business School, he moved it more aggressively into international business, started five new satellite centers and developed one of the most popular MBA programs for mid-career adults in the country, with the largest number of enrollments west of Chicago.
Along the way, he helped establish Pepperdine’s Malibu campus and build the public policy and business schools into leaders in their fields.
Wilburn has been the proverbial “man behind the curtain” when it came to getting things done at Pepperdine University throughout the past few decades. He became the Founding Dean of the School of Public Policy in 1997 and will continue in that position until transitioning to Dean Emeritus.
Starting his career at Pepperdine in 1971, Wilburn served as faculty member, Provost, Dean of the Graziadio School of Business & Management and Vice President for university affairs.
During his time as Pepperdine’s Provost in the ‘70s, Wilburn was instrumental in transitioning the university’s main campus from South L.A. to Malibu.
“For 10 years, we had two campuses, and the original campus was larger, but the day came when I felt like we needed to focus on one place,” Wilburn said in an interview.
As Dean of the Graziadio School of Business & Management, Wilburn was in large part responsible for raising the $8 to $10 million it took to build the Malibu campus buildings for that and several other programs. It was a huge expansion for Pepperdine.
“The MBA program began here in temporary mobile buildings,” Wilburn said. “And once the money was raised, we figured if we’re gonna carve up the mountain to expand, we might as well do it all at once. We also built a 600-unit dorm for grad students.”
For the past 18 years, Wilburn has been Dean of the School of Public Policy (SPP). Ironically, he turned down the position several times before accepting it because he wasn’t sure it was something Pepperdine should get into.
“I tried to talk Davenport (former Pepperdine President) out of it. I felt we already had enough government bureaucrats and we didn’t need to train any more,” Wilburn said. “I formed an advisory committee, agreed to an initial two years and then got sucked into it.”
The SPP today is a master’s degree program with about 100 students enrolled, including international students. Wilburn is proud of the variety of students the program attracts and their future goals, which have included fighting corruption in Nigeria, governing Native American tribes and helping the poor with micro financing.
Wilburn said the students come with a variety of backgrounds, like social work or law. “But mainly they’re service-oriented rather than money oriented,” Wilburn said. “Thirty or forty percent go to work for nonprofits, the rest work in international concerns, the State Dept., diplomacy, FBI, CIA and embassies.”
In addition to authoring several books on American history, business management, and faith and public policy, Wilburn has a PhD in economic history from UCLA, a master’s degree in history from Midwestern State University and an MBA from Pepperdine, and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Biblical studies from Abilene Christian University.
Wilburn plans to take a sabbatical during his first year as Dean Emeritus, hoping to turn two unfinished manuscripts and his doctoral dissertation into books. Eventually he would like to return to Pepperdine to teach.
Pete Peterson, Executive Director of the Davenport Institute for Public Engagement at the School of Public Policy and former candidate for California Secretary of State will serve as interim dean until a successor is identified.