Ivan Manev Awarded Nicolas Salgo Professorship
Contact: Ivan Manev, 581-1984; George Manlove, 581-3756
Ivan Manev, professor of management in the Maine Business School, has been named the University of Maine’s fourth Nicolas Salgo Professor of Business Administration.
The professorship is a five-year, renewable appointment accompanied by a financial award to be used to advance the international mission and priorities of the business school through research, international travel-study courses and service activities. Recipients, chosen by a multidisciplinary selection committee, must have a strong research record and demonstrate a willingness to work with the business community, in addition to the Maine Business School’s William S. Cohen Center for International Policy and Commerce.
Manev’s teaching and research interests are business management, entrepreneurship and international business. He joined the business faculty in 1997, having earned a bachelor’s degree at the Higher Institute of Economics in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1987, an MBA from the University of Minnesota, Duluth in 1992, and a Ph.D. from Boston College in 1997.
He has published and presented extensively, and also is the author of a book, The Managerial Network in a Multinational Enterprise.
“I am quite honored and in a way humbled, because typically these kinds of awards go to people closer to at the end of their career,” Manev says. “This is quite exciting, and I am grateful for the opportunity to advance research in the business school and make it better known in both the scholarly and business community.”
Manev, an Orono resident, is the fourth professor to receive the professorship, which was created in 1968 by an endowment from Nicolas Salgo, an immigrant who became a millionaire financier and commercial real estate developer, and served under the Reagan Administration as U.S. ambassador to his native Hungary.
Salgo wanted the professorship to enhance the visibility and reputation of the College of Business, Public Policy and Health at the University of Maine and, additionally, to further the business school’s international initiatives, research and publication efforts. Funding associated with the professorship will provide stipends for research staff and selected projects.
The professorship is important to the business school as it continues to broaden its curriculum and research, observes Dan Innis, dean of the College of Business, Public Policy and Health.
“Clearly, the economy is becoming much more global in scope. The Salgo professorship helps us pursue research and teaching that includes a global perspective,” Innis says. “This professorship, in conjunction with the Cohen Center, positions the school very well in terms of integrating those global perspectives into our research, publications and outreach.”
Salgo’s expertise was in international finance and the politics of Eastern Europe. The former president of Watergate Companies in Washington, D.C., which included the Watergate hotel properties, previously was consultant to the Bangor Punta, one of the first in a new generation of American corporate holding companies that started in the early 1960s with the ownership of the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad. Under Salgo’s leadership, and with two former Bangor & Aroostook presidents, Curtis Hutchinson and W. Gordon Robertson, the conglomerate diversified its holdings to include Punta Alegre Sugar Corporation, C-G-F Topeka Grain Elevators, Crown Fabrics, Smith & Wesson, Piper Aircraft and part of Harley Davidson, among other companies.
Bangor Punta was sold in 1983 to Lear Siegler, Inc.
Salgo, who died in 2005, was an early friend of the Maine Business School and also served on the Hudson Museum Board on Trustees.
Prior to Manev being awarded the professorship, retired business professor John Ford held the post.