Sacred Heart professor cited in ranking of nation’s top business educators

Mahfuja Malik, an associate professor of accounting at Sacred Heart University, was cited as one of the best in the country by Poets & Quants, a magazine dedicated to reporting on the top MBA programs across the country. Malik beat out more than 1,000 educators who were nominated for the 100 spots that were split evenly between graduate and undergraduate business education.

Malik is described by the students cited in her Poets and Quants profile as “the most caring, innovative, intelligent professor I have come across,” “outstanding, the most enjoyable and most effective professor I had at Sacred Heart University,” and “a G.O.A.T. (Greatest of All Time) when it comes to college professors.”

“It’s an incredible honor for me to be selected as one of the 50 best top professors,” Malik said. “It’s of course a great inspiration for me to be more dedicated, to spend more time with my students.”

Malik has focused much of her research on corporate social responsibility.

“I want to show how corporations can get benefits by serving society and being socially responsible,” Malik continued. “I started to analyze different factors that we can determine to be socially responsible for our population and the outcome in terms of share prices or accounting.”

According to Malik, these principles apply across the board to companies of any size, and companies that look beyond the short-term bottom line and consider the impact of their work on society and the local community will often see concrete benefits accrue over time.

Malik was nominated by Dr. Khawaja Mamun, an associate professor at Sacred Heart University and director of the Fairfield-based school’s masters in business analytics program. He took into account both Malik’s extensive work with the students’ positive feedback when filling out a survey issued by Poets & Quants.

Malik grew up in Bangladesh, where her father was a professor of literature. Malik’s passion was for business education, and that path led her to become a Fulbright Scholar and earn Sacred Heart’s 2021 Inclusive Teaching Fellowship.

Sacred Heart University’s “great breadth and diversity” also drew praise from Malik, who stated the university encouraged a great environment with easy communication and effective relationships between colleagues.

“But I believe that the students are what makes it incredible,” Malik added. “We have a small class size, and we have really close relationships with our students.”

“Also, I like this area,” Malik added of Fairfield and the surrounding area. She lives in Newtown and came to love the Northeast in general after pursuing her Ph.D. in accounting at Boston University. She also added the region was a great place to raise her children and enjoy an academic atmosphere.