Richard J. Bishirjian, Ph.D. is a businessman and educator.  He earned a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh (1964), and a Ph.D. in Government and International Studies from the University of Notre Dame (1972) under the direction of Gerhart Niemyer.  He did advanced study with Michael Oakeshott at the London School of Economics (1968/69) and studied Sanskrit at the Southern Asia Institute, Columbia University (1978).  Dr. Bishirjian taught at universities and colleges in Indiana, Texas and New York from 1968 to 1981.  He is the author of a history of political theory and editor of A Public Philosophy Reader that was cited by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute as one of the best studies of conservatism.  Dr. Bishirjian is the author of more than forty professional essays and reviews.  Appointed to the Office of the President-Elect in 1980, he served as a Team Leader with responsibility for the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was appointed by President Reagan as Acting Associate Director of the United States International Communication Agency, now USIA.  He served on the staff of the United States Senate.  He was president and founder of World News Institute, and Associate Director of Boston University, College of Communication.  Beginning with the fall of the Berlin wall, he worked in Eastern and Central Europe as a privatization consultant and/or partner with major corporations.  In 1996 he served as privatization consultant to the County of Allegheny, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  His previous experience in distance learning includes management of Boston University College of Communication’s continuing education seminars to government and business executives in the Washington, DC area.  Dr. Bishirjian has been a member of the Philadelphia Society since 1975 and serves as an Editorial Advisor to the quarterly journal founded by Russell Kirk, Modern Age.

Lewis G. Pringle, Ph.D. earned his undergraduate degree in Chemistry from Harvard, a Masters in Business from MIT, and a doctorate at MIT with specialization in statistics and operations research. Choosing to go into "business" was unusual for Ph.D. statisticians, but Pringle felt that business offered greater economic and personal satisfaction than the traditional course followed by newly-minted PhDs, so he accepted a position as Associate Director of Research in 1968 at BBDO, a large New York advertising agency.

At BBDO, Dr. Pringle was first given responsibility for quantitative methods and then for all research conducted by the agency, on behalf of clients and otherwise, outside the New York Company. In addition, he became responsible for BBDO’s Marketing Department,  Information Center as well as the training of young account executives within the agency. Then, in 1978, Lew was named Director of Research Services for all of BBDO Worldwide. He was elected Senior Vice President and member of the BBDO Worldwide Board of Directors (1978) and then Executive Vice President (1981). Even as Director, Dr. Pringle was able to participate personally in the improvement of the company’s techniques as well as in the creation of marketing and advertising strategy. BBDO, during this period, devoted substantial resources to research, employed between 100 and 200 professionals in this function and had documented credentials as the very best in research and strategy formulation.

In 1984, after six years as BBDO Worldwide’s Director of Research Services, Lew left that position to work with the Chairman/CEO and COO of BBDO Worldwide, to help them formulate a plan for the global future of the company. The task was a highly practical one; to answer the question "what organizational, structural and professional changes were needed in BBDO Worldwide to permit it to optimally address the rapidly evolving needs of its clients on a global scale?" In April of 1986, Dr. Pringle was named Chairman/CEO of BBDO Europe and, from his base in the U.K., assumed responsibility for BBDO’s interests in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. At the time, the agency’s Capitalized Sales were $550,000,000. During his four years tenure in this position, those sales tripled to over $1,600,000,000, while profit grew at about the same rate. Pringle regarded his biggest challenge in Europe as the integration of BBDO agencies, market by market, into an organization culturally and professionally committed to serving multinational clients in cross-border marketing and advertising efforts. Pringle numbers among his accomplishments that, during the era of glasnost, he brought BBDO to the Soviet Union, where it became a pioneer in the integration of modern Russia with the rest of the developed world.

In 1995, Dr. Pringle accepted a Chaired Professorship at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In that capacity, he taught, several times, the Capstone Course in Marketing Strategy as well as several courses in Market Research. Dr. Pringle also served six years as member of the Visiting Committee of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, as Associate Editor of Marketing Science for 15 years and has published a number of times in that journal as well as in such journals as the Journal of Marketing Research and the Harvard Business Review. He is currently a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Advertising as well as a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.