DeCenzo chats with the team during the NCAA Regional Baseball Tournament hosted by CCU.

"My original plan was to work in the corporate world for five years, but as a result of the merger and all the fun and games associated with that kind of event, I felt I got five years of experience in two."

After he had been at Blue Cross Blue Shield for about two and a half years, he was invited to join the faculty at Towson University in Baltimore. It was, he felt, the right time and the right place to re-enter academe. In the fall of 1986 he joined the faculty as an associate professor of management, beginning a 16-year association with Towson.

These were years of steady accomplishment as a teacher, scholar and administrator. He rose from tenured vice chair to chair of the management department to associate dean of Towson's business school. He co-wrote two highly regarded and widely used textbooks on supervision and management. He published dozens of articles in professional and scholastic journals. He began a long association with the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the international accrediting agency for business schools.

During his final years at Towson, DeCenzo ran the business school's external department as director of partnership development, forging synergistic alliances between the university and companies such as Moen Inc., VITAL Resources and Motorola Inc. His academic/corporate expertise also led him into consulting. Companies and agencies he has served include Citicorp Global Technology, AlliedSignal Technical Services and, more recently, Burroughs & Chapin Company and the Conway Chamber of Commerce.

"The faculty who were hired at Coastal stayed at Coastal. There was no revolving door. That sense of morale is passed on to the students. It's something you don't find at every university." ­

DeCenzo (right) presents outgoing board chairman Charlie Hodge with a print of the Atheneum.

DeCenzo knew about Coastal and South Carolina long before he applied for the position of dean of CCU's E. Craig Wall Sr. College of Business in 2002. His family vacationed in Myrtle Beach while he was growing up, and he had collected a store of fond memories of the area. Also, in 1968, as a result of the Pueblo incident (when North Korea captured an American military ship), his father's national guard unit was sent from its home at Andrews Air Force Base to the Myrtle Beach AFB for a time.

During most of his years at Towson, DeCenzo participated in an annual academic conference for college business schools held every September in Myrtle Beach. The Wall College always had a large role in the event, and ­over the years DeCenzo got to know some of the school's faculty—and something about the culture of Coastal as well.

"Coastal was known as a place with a congenial atmosphere for teaching and learning," he remembers. "The faculty who were hired at Coastal stayed at Coastal. There was no revolving door. That sense of morale is passed on to the students. It's something you don't find at every university. Often on my way to this annual conference I would swing through the campus from Highway 501 periodically to see how much it had grown since my last visit. I always had the feeling that Coastal was a diamond in the rough that was clearly becoming an institution of importance."

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