College of Business & Management
Dr. Arthur Wasserman of Bayside, dean of Cardinal Stritch University’s College of Business and Management, will be retiring July 31. He has been with Stritch since 1988.
The College of Business and Management is a pioneer in offering graduate and undergraduate programs designed for adult learners. Classes meet one night a week, with programs streamlined for accelerated learning.
Accomplishments during Wasserman’s tenure have been many. When he started, Stritch offered a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in management, an MBA, and one certificate program. Now, the college offers four certificate programs, an associate degree in business, four bachelor’s degrees and four master’s degrees. Enrollment grew from under 1,000 to close to 3,000 students, in Stritch campuses in Milwaukee, Madison and Edina, Minn., and in numerous satellite learning centers around the two states. In addition, five business advisory councils were established in the major learning centers in the two states, to help the college stay apprised of business community concerns and desires.
Under Wasserman, technology has greatly changed and enhanced the delivery of business education at Stritch. Starting in 1992, students in Stritch’s MBA program were each provided with a laptop computer for use in and out of class, and courses were modified to reflect that feature. Subsequently, the same change was made for other graduate and undergraduate degree programs.
Computer-aided distance learning using the Internet began in 1998 and has grown to more than 40 course offerings. Interactive video technology also has been utilized, to allow students located in a number of different places to take courses interactively at the same time. The Master of Science in Management degree program is currently being offered that way to students at Stritch and in Lake Geneva, and the MBA degree program is being offered to students in Green Bay and at Stritch.
The college also recently began offering an MBA for health-care executives for employees of the Marshfield Clinic. Stritch instructors teach students at the Marshfield site, and the courses are broadcast interactively by video to two other clinic sites, in Wausau and Minocqua.
Perhaps Wasserman’s most significant accomplishment at Stritch was leading the successful effort to achieve professional accreditation for the university’s non-traditional and traditional business programs from the Association of Collegiate Business Schools and Programs (ACBSP), one of the two major business school accrediting bodies in the United States.
“I’ve been running a non-profit business here at Stritch, one that is designed to transform lives,” Wasserman said. “And there’s a joy that comes from the management process. Helping people to grow is what management is all about.”
Wasserman joined Stritch full-time in 1988 as the head of what would later become the College of Business and Management. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he graduated with a BS in chemical engineering in 1951, and earned an MS in chemical engineering in 1952, doing part of his coursework at a government atomic energy facility in Oakridge, Tenn.
As a Rhodes Scholar, he attended Oxford University in England and was affiliated with Lincoln College there. He received a master of arts in physics in 1954 and then returned to MIT and completed work for a Ph.D. in chemical/nuclear engineering in 1962.
MIT research advisors with ties to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos helped Wasserman gain practical project experience at the Atomic Energy Division of the Phillips Petroleum Company at the National Reactor Testing Station in southeastern Idaho, starting during the summer of 1956, and he remained with Phillips in Idaho until 1963. Wasserman subsequently spent five years with Westinghouse Corp.’s Astronuclear Division.
In 1968, he began working for Allis-Chalmers. During his 18 years there, he acquired an MBA from the University of Chicago, headed a corporate engineering department, served as a product manager for an electrical product line, traveled extensively doing market development work in Russia and Eastern Europe, and lived for three years in England, where he served as managing director of an Allis-Chalmers subsidiary. He then spent a year in Birmingham, Ala., where he managed another A-C subsidiary and then returned to Milwaukee as vice president and general manager of a major division there. Wasserman took early retirement from Allis-Chalmers in December 1986 and became president and CEO of an entrepreneurial heat-transfer equipment business, where he worked for two years before joining Stritch full-time.
July 20, 2001 Small Business Times, Milwaukee
