The final Celebration of Achievement of the Ilene Kleinsorge era took place June 4 at Reser Stadium and included a collection of her colleagues paying a David Letterman-style tribute to the retiring dean: “Ten things we’ve always wanted to say to Ilene.”
The one-liners included a dig at Kleinsorge’s trademark running shoes, and an admission by one professor that she’d bumped into Kleinsorge at an airport not during a research term, as Kleinsorge had thought (and had found irksome enough), but during a teaching term.
“I had my classes covered,” the professor said to a din of laughter.
During the awards presentation part of the night, the following honors were bestowed:
College Service Outreach Award – Jonathan Arthurs;
Byron L. Newton Award – Excellence in Teaching – Anthony Klotz;
Outstanding Professional Faculty & Staff Service Award – Laura Scott;
Excellence in Scholarship Award – Pauline Schilpzand;
Experiential Learning Award – Christine Gallagher;
College Service Award – Jared Moore;
Betty and Forrest Simmons Excellence in Graduate Teaching Fellowship – Aimee Huff;
Newcomb Fellowships – Jenn Casey, Pam Knowles and VT Raja
Jeremy Banka affixes lettering to the wall of the display area at the Autzen House.
Sometime this summer, drop by the Autzen House, home of the OSU Center for the Humanities, and check out the collection of Occupy Movement posters from around the world put together by Andrea Marks, a graphic design professor, and one of her students, freshman Jeremy Banka.
Inside the exhibit room at the Autzen House, 811 S.W. Jefferson Ave., are 30 posters selected by Marks and Banka; the works on display are a small part of the Occuprint collection viewable at occuprint.org.
“The posters were chosen for their visual variety and cleverness in communication,” Marks said.
Banka designed the typeface, which he named Ergata, used on the various pieces of text that accompany the posters.
“There is no better visual artifact to record history than the poster,” the professor said. “Protest posters give the viewer a snapshot into a country’s political and social history.”
The poster project stems from a Center for Humanities Grant that Marks received in 2012. The posters will be on display through mid-September; viewing is free.
Ilene Kleinsorge’s final day as dean of the College of Business was June 30.
As she begins her retirement, please join us in thanking her for her many contributions, and we hope you enjoy this collection of photographs from Kleinsorge’s time as the college’s leader.
Benny Beaver was among retiring professor Erik Larson’s well-wishers.
Fittingly, as management professor, Neil Young devotee and renowned good guy Erik Larson took the podium at his retirement celebration May 15, Young’s tour de force “Heart of Gold” poured forth from the sound system in the Robert Family Events Room.
“I want to live; I want to give,” Young sang. “I’ve been a miner for a heart of gold.”
That’s exactly what the College of Business collected back in 1980 when it lured a young scholar west from SUNY-Buffalo, the pairing working so well that Larson became something of a rarity: a professor whose entire career took place at one university.
“I’m proud to have worked at Oregon State and in this college,” Larson said. “And I’m really glad to have gotten to spend my last year here, in the house that Ilene built.”
A colleague of Dean Ilene Kleinsorge for nearly three decades, Larson chose for his final year at the university a corner, fourth-floor office at brand-new Austin Hall as an exclamation point after spending 34 years in the college’s former home, Bexell Hall.
“It’s up to you guys to make (Austin Hall) a home,” he told the dozens of faculty and staff who turned out to wish him a well – a crowd whose size surprised the unassuming project-management legend.
“I told my wife as we were driving over here, ‘I wonder if anybody will show up; it’s a Friday afternoon,’’ Larson said.
Fellow management professor Keith Leavitt emceed the event (and arranged for the Young soundtrack). Leavitt said Larson was defined by genuine concern for others exemplified by how he shielded young faculty from things they didn’t need to worry about and spoke with candor about the issues they did need to be concerned with.
“Erik will tell you exactly what’s on his mind,” Leavitt said. “And he embodies the culture of the College of Business: Performance should never sacrifice people. He’ll always remind you not to take yourself too seriously.”
In retirement, Larson plans to follow Young’s advice to keep on rockin’ in the free world – with an emphasis on the world part of that. He’s been to 45 countries and wants to visit another 45, likely teaching part time wherever his travels find him and his wife, Ann – whom he thanked from the podium for “putting up with me.”
“I don’t know how she does it,” Larson said, training his eyes on her in the crowd. “I love you.”
For design professor Leslie Burns, being a scholar has meant seeing her research change the world for the better in ways she never even imagined.
Just one example: Her work with Sharron Lennon of Indiana University on the role of appearance in social perception has been used to refute rape defendants’ claims that what the victim was wearing was responsible for the defendant believing she wanted to have sex.
“Social perception is as much about the perceiver as it is who is being perceived, and so the judgments made often can’t be generalized beyond the perceiver,” Burns explained.
That means that whereas once upon a time an accused attacker could attempt a sexy-dress defense in court – as ludicrous as that may sound – Burns and Lennon scientifically disproved the notion that a particular type of apparel could be generally taken as consent.
Burns, who is retiring following spring term after 30 years at Oregon State, grew up in northwestern Montana in Cut Bank, a town of about 3,000 people 30 miles south of the Canadian border.
“I started designing clothing when I was in grade school, but I didn’t know that could be a career,” she said.
At Washington State she studied clothing and textiles and also developed a fondness for marketing research. Moving on to Purdue, she earned a Ph.D. in consumer sciences and retailing.
Burns was an instructor at San Diego State for a year and an assistant professor at Utah State for three before arriving in Corvallis, where her work has included five years in academic affairs; she helped create the degree partnership programs now in place between OSU and Oregon’s community colleges.
Burns is gratified by the partnership, along with her impactful research, and of how OSU started what is now a highly respected Ph.D. program in design and human environment.
“Seeing it grow and become acknowledged as one of the top doctoral programs in the country, I’m really proud of that,” she said.
In retirement, Burns will operate a startup, Responsible Global Fashion, LLC., which will produce educational materials aimed at helping the fashion industry make socially conscious decisions such as the ones she emphasizes to her students.
“I want to get to the decision makers of the future, that’s where the difference can be made,” she said. “These students, they are going to be the decision makers. I have a vision of where I see our industry headed.”
Burns is one of two longtime College of Business professors retiring this year. The other is Erik Larson, who will be featured in the COB blog later this week.
The Austin Family Business Program in Oregon State University’s College of Business has been selected as the 2015 recipient of the Family Firm Institute’s Interdisciplinary Achievement Award.
“This prestigious award is the pinnacle of achievement in the field and we are pleased to name the Austin Family Business Program as its recipient for 2015,” said Judy Green, president of the institute, which is the leading association worldwide for family enterprise professionals.
Established in 1999, the Interdisciplinary Award recognizes outstanding achievement in the advancement of interdisciplinary services to business families. It is the highest professional honor presented by the Family Firm Institute, which provides research-based learning and relevant tools for advisors and consultants, academics and family enterprise members to drive success.
“We’re thrilled to receive this recognition from FFI that honors our commitment to delivering quality education to family businesses,” said program director Sherri Noxel. “It’s particularly special for us because 2015 is our 30-year anniversary.”
Founded in 1985, the Austin Family Business Program provides inspiration, education, outreach and research to support the success and survival of family businesses.
The program works with family business advising practitioners and consultants to design educational programs to prepare family businesses to balance the well-being of the business, the family and individuals, Noxel said.
Noxel will accept the award on behalf of the program at the FFI Gala Awards Dinner in October in London.
All eight College of Business faculty members nominated this year for indefinite tenure and/or promotion have been approved, Dean Ilene Kleinsorge announced May 19.
Advancing to associate professor and receiving indefinite tenure are Keith Leavitt (management), Michelle Barnhart (marketing) and Jeff Barden (entrepreneurship), and also earning indefinite tenure is Associate Professor Seunghae Lee (interior design).
Don Neubaum (entrepreneurship), Zhaohui Wu (international business) and Jimmy Yang (finance)
have been promoted to professor, and Aaron Lewis (international business) has been elevated to senior instructor I.
Tenure and promotion require a lengthy college and university review process culminating with final approval granted by the university provost/executive vice president.
Minjeong Kim, associate dean of the College of Business, explained April 30 why she enjoys studying how people go about shopping for apparel.
“If you go to the grocery store for Coke or Pepsi, you know what you’re going to buy,” she told members of Triad, OSU’s faculty and staff club, at its weekly meeting at the Memorial Union building. “But if you go to a clothing store, you know you need a new jacket, or a new outfit for some event, but you don’t know what you’re going to buy. Every time you go in, it’s a whole new experience.”
The title of Kim’s lunch-hour presentation was “Online Apparel Shopping: A Peek into the Consumer’s Mind.”
“It’s about an emotional connection with the product,” she said. “So how can people buy apparel online when they can’t see it or feel it or try it on? My research came out of skepticism — how could they do that?”
Kim has studied a variety of e-commerce website design techniques and their effect, if any, on facilitating someone to make a purchase decision.
For example, she theorized that seeing a larger picture of an item would generate a stronger purchase intention than a smaller photo, but that did not prove to be the case. Seeing more product information in the form of text, however, did create a stronger purchase intention.
Kim explained to Triad the concept of concreteness, defined as the degree of ease or difficulty involved in eliciting a mental image. Concrete words such as “apple” tend to invoke a sensory experience, whereas non-concrete words such as “religion” do not.
She also spoke about mental imagery – the process by which sensory or perceptual experience is represented in an individual’s working memory – and speculated that mental imagery could be a key to facilitating a satisfactory virtual shopping experience without having physical experience with a product.
Putting those concepts together, she talked about how whether a product such as a swimsuit sells better online if the photo of the model has a blank background or a concrete one, such as a beach scene. Results depended, she said, on whether the shopper was a visual learner (generally more likely to buy with a concrete background) or verbal learner (more likely with a blank background).
And responding to a post-presentation question from the audience, she provided information that likely most suspected was true: For men, clothes shopping tends toward hasty and utilitarian, whereas for women it’s often a pleasure-seeking experience.
Ask College of Business students of any major about faculty members who have had a particular impact on them, and the response is likely to include instructor Gene Young.
Young, a former engineer and manager at Hewlett-Packard, created the course he teaches: BA 353. The course title is Professional Development, and Young explains that his class has two primary objectives: “To pop the bubble of what school is versus what happens in the workplace, and to prepare them to give killer interviews.”
“It matters if you’re late,” Young says. “If your boss gives you a task and a deadline and you don’t get it done, you can’t just say ‘I forgot.’ There are no do-overs.”
Being a topnotch interviewee, he says, is all about making a genuine connection with the interviewers and having a story about yourself to tell, and telling it in a confident, coherent manner that includes being able to give examples to back up what you claim your abilities are.
Young explains that hiring decisions, like purchasing decisions, are emotional – you want to hire a particular candidate, or buy a particular car, and then your mind goes to work trying to find logical reasons to justify the desire.
That’s why building an authentic connection with interviewers is so important.
For more information, drop Young an email – he’ll appreciate your initiative – or better yet, enroll in his course.
Stan Baker talks about his company, Baker Seed, which produces nutrient-coated grass seed.
The safe storage of energy.
Sustainably produced sunglasses and ski goggles.
Four-legged military robots whose motion replicates the efficient gait of animals.
Those were just a few of the presentation topics the evening of Thursday, Jan. 8, at the Majestic Theatre in downtown Corvallis as the Oregon State University Advantage Accelerator held its first Demo Day.
The event’s aim was to bring together current and future clients for a night of networking and getting the word out regarding their technologies and business operations to an audience that included state Sen. Lee Beyer and various members of the OSU College of Business, including Dean Ilene Kleinsorge.
Beyer, a Democrat from Springfield who represents District 6, led the $3.75 million funding effort in 2013 that created the South Willamette Valley Regional Accelerator Network, known as RAIN, which has locations in Corvallis and Eugene; those cities, along with Albany and Springfield, are partners in the network as well.
OSU Advantage Accelerator co-directors Mark Lieberman and John Turner hosted the event, at which each member of the fall 2014 Accelerator cohort was asked to give a seven-minute presentation about his product, the technology behind it, the status of the business, and projections about short- and long-term growth and profitability.
The fall cohort includes Agility Robotics, Baker Seed, Bosky Optics, KW Associates, NRGindependence and TAPs, a stainless steel surface modification technology business whose motto is “Solving the World’s Corrosion Problem One Piece of Metal at a Time.”
After the presentations, Lieberman and Turner presented four awards. The Archimedes Award went to Accelerator intern Brady Finkenauer, a wealth management MBA student; the Chasing the Bone Award went to Alex Cruft and Matthew Miner of Bosky Optics; the Pounding the Pavement Award went to Stan and Glenda Baker of Baker Seed, whose product is grass seed coated in nutrients for optimum germination and health; and the Entrepreneur of the Year Award went to Paul King of KW Associates, which aims to solve safety and efficiency problems in the specialty metals and industrial microwave industries.
After the fall 2014 cohort presentations, members of the winter 2015 cohort spoke for a minute or two each outlining the technologies they’d be bringing to Accelerator for commercialization assistance. They’ll get a chance for longer presentations at the next Demo Day, a date for which has not yet been set.
OSU Advantage co-directors Mark Lieberman, left, and John Turner were the Demo Day hosts.
