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WILKES-BARRE — Abel Adekola has a “Varidesk” that lets him stand while working, an “easy” button, a wooden cobra in the corner next to a singing fish, and a whopper of a true story about his first winter in Wisconsin.
Born in Nigeria and transplanted as a student to Florida at the age of 21, Wilkes University’s new dean of the Jay S. Sidhu School of Business and Leadership never knew snow before taking a faculty position at the University of Wisconsin 21 years ago.
An avid storyteller, he grins as he recounts the first time he and his wife — a lifetime Floridian up to that point — stepped into his new Wisconsin office to find a gift in a bag.
“It was a brush,” he said, “We said, ‘what is it, maybe it’s to brush the desk?” So I brushed the desk.” The scraper on the other end made even less sense. They assumed it was to scrape things off the floor. “But I have to bend over.
“I threw it away.” Adekola, 61, confessed. It was only after emerging from teaching a night class in winter and finding his windshield wipers frozen in ice — and watching as a colleague scrape his windshield — that the purpose of the tossed gift dawned.
The silence of the first snowfall also surprised him. They knew it would snow, but when he saw the white blanket for the first time one morning he and his wife were stunned. “We hadn’t heard anything. We thought it would make a noise like rain!”
Make no mistake, Adekola is no provincial myopic, unaware of the world beyond his home. You can’t walk into his office without a quick and lively tour of the places he’s been.
The wooden cobra with the elaborately hinged body — which effectively startled a colleague one night in Wisconsin — came from India. There’s a carved wooden mask from Hawaii, and wooden frog that doubles as a percussion toy from Thailand. There’s a picture from a visit in Scotland.
There are mementos from his Rhodes Scholarship year in Thailand, and from trips to Spain, London, Paris and South Korea. There’s even an ornate box holding small stones he picked up in Wales.
That’s all partly from a career increasingly focused on international business, but also from an attitude he tries to impart on his students, sometimes through the African tale of a frog in a coconut.
“They say that’s impossible, but I say shut up and just pretend,” he laughed. The frog lives in a world that’s milky and succulent, but “that’s all he knows. Then someone accidentally cracks the coconut and everything is not milky and succulent.”
Traveling abroad doesn’t just expose you to the way others live, it make you appreciate what you have. “The United States is the greatest country in the world,” he said. “But it’s only six percent of the population. It’s like reading six pages out of a 100 page book.
Adekola is not above a bit of deceit. When Wisconsin wooed him, his wife was adamantly opposed to moving there, so he made sure to set up a phone interview when he knew she’d be away. And when he visited the campus and called her back in Florida to suggest they take the offer, he heard silence. “Then I realized she had already hung up.”
But they fell in love with the less crowded setting, and Adekola worked his way up from faculty to dean. They liked it so much “I planned to retire there.”
So how did he end up in Wilkes-Barre, in a corner office of a building originally designed as a call center?
He watched as the share of state funding for higher education in Wisconsin dropped from 45 percent to about 14 percent, and figured it was time to look elsewhere. He got three offers, and picked Wilkes first because opportunities it presented, then in response to personal calls from top administration after he had visited the campus.
“I got a call from the provost on Friday and from the president on Sunday,” he recalled. “This meant a lot to me.”
He arrived June 1 and expects to stay until retirement, when he and his wife will settle in a Florida condo used for family gatherings.
He has already launched a reorganization of the school, bringing in a new associate dean and MBA director. He’s determined to get the program accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, a task that he said typically “takes seven years, but we want to do it in four.”
The overarching goal, Adekola said, is to transform the program “from a regional business school to a national business school.”
And the “that was easy” button? Actually, it’s a reminder of the opposite.
“When I was dean at Wisconsin the staff from the School of Hospitality gave it to me and said it was ‘so anything we ask, we want you to press it’.”
He laughs.
“But it didn’t happen that way, of course.”