
Allan P. Kirby Center for Free Enterprise and Entrepreneurship at Wilkes University
Charles J. Pierce, Interim Executive Director – Wilkes University Allan P. Kirby Center for Free Enterprise and Entrepreneurship
Who We Are
Founded in 1993, the Allan P. Kirby Center for Free Enterprise and Entrepreneurship is dedicated to teaching the principles of free enterprise and entrepreneurship. As an independent Center, affiliated with the Jay S. Sidhu School of Business and Leadership at Wilkes University, the Center serves the entire University and region of northeast Pennsylvania.
Mission
The Center has a rich history of activities for undergraduate, graduate and continuing education students including special lectures and seminars, and support for student business owners to stress the real-world application of classroom material.
We hold that economic individualism and independence within a society that respects and protects the private ownership of property, and acknowledges as primary to our free enterprise system the belief that business must be permitted to operate for profit with minimal government regulation and within a non-confiscatory tax structure designed to provide incentive for the investment of private capital, to the end that individual initiative and effort may be encouraged, promoted, and protected, and may receive its just reward, and that the fallacies of theories and practices, which tend to hamper, discourage and throttle individual effort and individual energy, maybe exposed and avoided.
Vision
The Allan P. Kirby Center for Free Enterprise and Entrepreneurship at Wilkes University will promote the firm belief that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness envisioned by the founders of the United States of America may be achieved, protected and perpetuated through a free enterprise system and the active encouragement of entrepreneurship.

