April 5, 2007
Bud Saxberg’s half-century: Business prof celebrates 50 years at the UW — and counting
When Borje “Bud” Saxberg starting teaching at the UW Business School, tuition was about $100 per quarter, assistant professors made $6,000 annually, and the school was located in the Quad, a fair distance from where it now occupies Balmer and MacKenzie Halls. Much has changed since then — but then, things generally do over the course of half a century.
Saxberg, a professor of management and organization whose career began here in 1957, was led to the United States from his native Finland by way of a scholarship he received from Oregon State University in Corvallis.
“After learning I’d received a scholarship, I quickly sailed for New York, bought a bus ticket to Portland, Oregon, and as I got off the bus five days later, the United States map had become a reality for me,” he said.
Opportunities opened up for further study at the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana, and the years went by swiftly, including marriage to his wife Margaret, a Norwegian student, and the birth of a son. Then in 1957 he ventured west, to the UW, where a number of fellow Illinois graduate students had become members of the Business School faculty.
A Ford Foundation Faculty Study Fellowship at Cornell University between 1960-61 in the Department of Sociology, Social Psychology, and Anthropology briefly took him away from the UW. He says this fellowship sparked his interest in his academic work that has ever since focused on the application of behavioral sciences to management.
Saxberg, who is 79 and has no plans to retire anytime soon, says he thinks it’s important to maintain a balance of academic work and “practical” opportunities like consulting and hosting Entrepreneurs and Innovators, a business-themed interview-format program that airs twice-weekly on Seattle Community Colleges Educational Television, channel 28.
He says he’s allowed to live vicariously through the people he interviews.
He tries to make several annual trips to Norway, where his wife, a retired realtor, lives about half the year and manages their second home, a family farm. The farm, situated about 60 miles northeast of Oslo, produces rye, barley and has a timber operation.
He says it’s his hobbies outside of the classroom that help keep him continuously curious about life.
One of those hobbies is his collection of stereo cameras, which produce 3-D images, to which he’s been adding for decades. He owns 200 to 300 of them, which contain several lenses that allow an image to be captured in three dimensions.
This collection, he says, helps transport him to another time-period.
“If you have a treasure box, you’re more likely to live longer because you can go to your hobby and totally concentrate on something else and lose yourself in it.”
One could almost say he seems to have lost himself in teaching, too.
“Indeed,” with respect to teaching, he says, “I’m surprised myself that 50 years have gone by.”
In the past half-century, business education has undergone a number of changes, he says.
In thinking about teaching students then back in the 1950s versus now, he says there was more respect shown by students toward their teachers. At the undergraduate level, the teacher was there to teach, and the students were there to learn. It was a time of optimism, an expanding economy, and growth period for the Business School.
The ‘60s loosened up the authority structure. The students were invited to share their views with the faculty. In the process, student evaluations went from being a private communication between students and faculty, to a University-required procedure open to public inspection. Faculty became more accountable, and more responsive to the responsibilities attached to teaching, he says.
“Today, in my subject area of management, topics have to be presented in a way that creates student interest. The students need more opportunity to be involved in their own learning, such as group projects, individual and team reports, field work, shadowing executives at work, and case study analyses.
“But I do believe that our current student generation is very good and appreciates the opportunity they have in view of the competitive entry into the University as well as into the Business School.”
One of Saxberg’s former graduate students, Howard Smith, now dean of the College of Business and Economics at Boise State University, says he feels indebted to lessons he learned from Saxberg. Smith has stayed in touch with Saxberg since 1976, when he graduated from the UW Business School with a doctorate.
“Bud’s a true gentleman and scholar, and as chair of my dissertation committee, he helped correct me and guide me through,” Smith said. “He has an encouraging, positive attitude and truly has a gifted way of mentoring students.”
His reputation among administrators and deans at various universities is also strong, says Smith, adding that it’s “astounding just how many people he knows in the academic world.”
Former UW President William Gerberding says it was Saxberg’s equitable demeanor that helped ease potential tensions between UW faculty and administrators in the early ‘80s when Saxberg served as chair of the Faculty Senate.
During that time, says Gerberding, the UW went through several years of budget cuts due to the deep recession in the country and state. Gerberding was himself a relative newcomer, having been appointed president in 1979, and recalls that the potential for harsh conflict between an administration obliged to make deep budget cuts and the faculty was considerable and the role of the Faculty Senate was therefore crucial.
“Bud was from beginning to end a statesman with a humane and tolerant view of our problems,” Gerberding says.
“He was a deeply sensitive and constructive man and as a somewhat new UW President I was extremely grateful for his kind presence and broad view.
The administration and the faculty worked together, not as adversaries but as colleagues who respected each other and needed to deal with wrenching problems. Bud was perfect for this unwelcome role.”
While his roles at the UW have continued to expand and evolve over the past five decades, his genuine interest in students has not.
Kaler Body, a 2006 graduate who is a financial risk analyst at Seattle’s Fund of Hedge Funds, says Saxberg’s success as an educator goes way beyond his teaching skills.
“He has the ability to motivate students to think about the situations of an individual, or groups of individuals, might face from a number of different perspectives and to question every assumption,” Body says.
“He has a friendly personality and casual demeanor yet always remained committed to ensuring that I challenged myself in order gain an invaluable experience.”
In addition to teaching undergraduate courses in strategic management and business policy during fall and winter quarters, throughout the year he’s a member of the Certificate for International Studies in Business faculty, acting as adviser to the German track students who are interested in Germany and the German language.
Other duties tend to accumulate, he says, and he’s now assumed the role of faculty director for International Exchange Alliances of the Business School, and actively supports the work of the school’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
“I’ve learned over the years that you need to learn to love teaching and creating your own approach so your students feel rapport with you and a willingness to learn.”
