By Elliott Nace | Staff Writer
During the first week of the 2025 Wintermester, the university held its inaugural “Leadership and Innovation at Disney” course, a philanthropy and public service credit that examines the company’s business model through a weeklong trip to the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Fla. The course amplified students’ study of the Walt Disney Company’s leadership strategies through onsite interaction.
The PPS 1100 series, to which the course belongs, is a recent addition to the university course catalog, with each course focusing on a specific skill found in quality service. Dr. Jeremy Vickers, associate vice president of innovation and economic development, said the leadership course evolved into a joint venture with the Center for Global Engagement, and eventually Disney.
“The topic of leadership and a travel component led us to, ‘I wonder if we could make this work by studying one company in particular, one that’s known for leadership and innovation and service, really, in a lot of ways.’ And that was the Disney Company,” Vickers said.
Vickers, who led the course’s maiden voyage, said that while he had prior experience with Disney leadership programs at the university, they were characterized by lectures. Therefore, they lacked the academic structure needed to fully take advantage of the Disney setting.
“We wanted to have — and needed to have — a service learning component to [the course], where the students would have an opportunity to serve and consider the implications on community and public service,” he said.
In order to better contextualize the company’s high service standards, the course followed up with experiential visits to the Walt Disney World Resort with a volunteer opportunity at Give Kids the World Village, an Orlando-based nonprofit resort where “children with critical illnesses and their families are treated to weeklong, cost-free vacations,” according to their website.
These two exercises, alongside some literature assigned ahead of the trip, prepared students to then produce leadership training programs for nonprofits in the Waco area.
Students were given the chance to go on a backstage tour of Cirque du Soleil’s and Disney’s production, “Drawn to Life,” as well as meet Stephanie Young, president of the Disney Vacation Club and former president and managing director of Hong Kong Disneyland Resort. However, they were equally encouraged to interact with cast members across the entire Walt Disney World Resort.
“The experience that’s provided is often in the hands of an hourly employee or volunteer,” Vickers said. “Every individual member of a team is able to be innovative and creative, and I think we saw that up and down.”
The course’s structure sought to introduce students to examples of leadership ranging from the large scale of an entertainment destination to the merits of a single employee. Jennifer Cook, a study abroad program adviser at the Center for Global Engagement, said while leading the trip she observed that students first picked up on leadership skills while interacting with the Disney parks.
“Disney does a really good job of, even if you don’t have someone from Disney there in front of you explaining what you’re seeing, that there are things that are very intentional about the parks,” Cook said. “Whether it’s design, whether it’s interaction, whether it’s visual, your senses are being stimulated all the time.”
Due to a short time frame for advertising, only 10 students registered for the course. However, its contents will benefit as interest and attendance grow in the near future. The course can begin to offer an in-house leadership seminar run by Disney Institute, the company’s professional development division, as more students enroll.
“I think next time, given we pulled this off really quickly, having more lead time, having 15 or more students, having that Disney-led training experience workshop, to me, would be just one notch up,” Vickers said.
An uptick in course attendance will allow for further use of in-house Disney leadership resources and therefore remove the need for a nonstop itinerary within the theme parks, Cook said.
“I think having more students go on the program will increase our likelihood of having more Disney-integrated content with park time because we definitely did not want to have this really strict schedule while in the parks, ” Cook said.
The course represents a new kind of offering from the Center for Global Engagement, in that it gives students of all academic backgrounds an experiential learning opportunity with a domestic company known for its efficiency and innovation. Its practicality and incorporation of volunteer service complement the mission of Baylor’s PPS program, which, according to the university website, seeks “to enrich the intellectual, social, and moral lives of undergraduate students.”
“I think this course is an opportunity to further translate some of the things that you’re experiencing throughout your undergrad experience,” Vickers said. “From a Disney leadership model to what I would call ‘Christian servant leadership,’ which is what we espouse as a Christian institution, I think there’s a lot of commonality [with Disney], even though it’s a secular organization.”
