Stanford Business magazine

The Golden Legacy of Ernie Arbuckle

By Cathy Castillo

Fifty years after Ernie Arbuckle was named dean and nearly 25 years after his death, his name is still everywhere at the Business School.

In February the 40-year-old Arbuckle Award, the School’s oldest alumni recognition, was presented to Henry Segerstrom, BA ’46, MBA ’48, citing him as “an individual judged to best exemplify the qualities of dynamic leadership and administrative skills so evident in the man it honors.” In June a member of the Class of 2008 will receive the student Arbuckle Award—recognition by peers that he or she is essentially the heart and soul of the class. In 1982 a group of his friends endowed the Ernest C. Arbuckle Professorship, held today by Kathryn Shaw. And a portrait of Arbuckle and his wife, Kitty, greets visitors as they enter the Arbuckle Cafe for their daily lattes, burritos, and sushi.

The School has had other great deans and outstanding faculty, but Ernie (no one refers to him as Dean Arbuckle, and few recall him as “Arbuckle”) holds a special niche—half fun and good stories and half admiration for a legacy that endures. One of the fun Ernie stories took place in 1967 when Stanford students, including undergrads, voted him the “Red Hot Professor.” Ernie acknowledged the honor by donning his undergraduate letterman’s sweater—earned for tossing the javelin impressive distances—and leading the student body in the Axe yell during the Stanford vs. Oregon football game. The event was immortalized in photographs that found their way into Time magazine and eventually into virtually every history of the University.

A few years later Arjay Miller, who succeeded Ernie as dean, handed him a sweater at the 1975 Arbuckle dinner and insisted Ernie repeat the performance. Flashing a sheepish grin, Ernie stood before the cheering alumni and announced: “Well, if we’re going to do this we have to do it right,” and then executed a perfect cheerleading performance that rattled the wine glasses and brought down the house.

Doing things right was something Ernie insisted on and excelled at.

Arbuckle had put himself through Stanford as an undergraduate working odd jobs including reading to a blind man and a summer stint as a section hand on the Sierra Railroad. After earning his MBA in 1936, he worked for Standard Oil and Golden State Co., then a major dairy; commanded a PT boat during World War II; and was an executive of W.R. Grace immediately before becoming dean in July 1958.

During World War II business schools struggled to stay alive as students and many faculty were scooped up in the war effort. The war decimated PhD programs, virtually cutting off the supply of new faculty. By the mid-1950s not only were students flooding back under the GI Bill but critics—who would be joined shortly by studies from the Ford and Carnegie foundations—were demanding loudly that business schools do a better job of educating managers. When Dean Hugh Jackson announced his retirement in 1956 after 25 years, Ernie Arbuckle, then a Stanford trustee, was named to the committee to find a new dean.

Committee member George Jedenoff, AB ’40, MBA ’42, who knew Ernie first as a fellow Stanford rugby player, recalls that “the committee decided we should have a businessman as dean. He had to sell the School to the business community. That was important to us as we recovered from the war years. Ernie was a wonderful selection.”

Getting him to take the job wasn’t easy, however. Ernie kept turning down University President Wallace Sterling’s offers. “What turned the trick was Wally put Ernie on a plane to New York, took him to the Waldorf-Astoria, and shoved him into a room with Herbert Hoover,” recalled James Howell, the Theodore J. Kreps Professor of Economics, Emeritus. “Hoover [the man responsible for creating the Business School in the first place] beat down all Ernie’s complaints. He kept saying ‘I’ll solve that.’ Ernie came out and said it was the greatest sales job he’d ever seen.”

Howell, along with Robert Gordon, authored the 1959 report for the Ford Foundation credited with turning around management education by challenging it to become less vocational and more academic. Just months after becoming dean, Ernie had formed two committees, one of faculty to develop a 10-year plan, and another of business people to advise him. He showed up at 6:45 every Tuesday morning to make the coffee for the faculty group, and “we pounded out the plan by December,” recalled Howell, who then went to work reconfiguring the curriculum. The School added organizational behavior, more quantitative methods, microeconomics, and business policy; revamped accounting, marketing, and finance; and eliminated real estate, transportation, insurance, and law courses.

Howell had visited 90 universities, in researching the Gordon-Howell report, so for the first five years Arbuckle relied on Howell for advice on faculty hires. “Ernie always closed the deal in hiring new faculty. My wife estimates we probably had 50 chicken dinners at the Arbuckles’ while those deals were made,” said Howell. Their first hire was Chuck Bonini, a young statistics professor regarded as one of the top in his field.

“He built trust with the faculty,” recalled Bonini, who watched the curriculum expand to include management science and decision science subjects. “Ernie loved the School and was very dedicated to it. He was also part of the University at large and that was important.” Soon James Porterfield and Robert Davis and a young associate professor named Robert Jaedicke moved west from Harvard.

Another young faculty member was James Van Horne, who noted that when Arbuckle arrived there were 11 tenure-line faculty members, 8 over the age of 60. Seven years later, “when I came in ’65, there were 54 faculty members and the School was very exciting,” Van Horne said. Arbuckle would “come around once a month, come into the faculty offices and just talk. Other academics realized the School was onto something. In ’67 we were far more quantitative than other schools in the nation; we were at the vanguard.”

Once Ernie set out to make a hire, he knew who to ask to help him get the resources he needed. He duck hunted with Hewlett and Packard. (“He’d be the first one up in the morning, and he’d hike deeper into the woods with his tremendous energy,” recalled Arjay Miller.) He knew Common Cause founder John Gardner well and made famous Gardner’s advice to repot his career every 10 years, moving seamlessly from leadership in one industry to another. “He had more friends than anyone I knew,” recalled Miller. “If you went out to lunch with him, when you returned there’d be 8 or 10 notes on his desk from people who had called. He’d sit down and call them all back.”

“Ernie was a good judge of people. The world of business is big and complex. You can’t make it alone, so you are as good as the people you know, and Ernie knew plenty,” said Miller. “I’d say understanding people was really his long suit.”

“He had an incredible sense about people,” agreed Dean Robert Joss, who was an MBA, Sloan, and PhD student during Arbuckle’s deanship and was later recruited by him at Wells Fargo Bank. “Ernie didn’t know the academic literature independently. He didn’t know who he needed to hire [to expand the faculty], but he knew who to ask for advice.”

Arbuckle also invited a few friends to serve on the School’s newly created Advisory Council, an important vehicle to this day for bringing business leaders in touch with management education.

“In the beginning we didn’t want to increase the size of the student body, which was good,” recalled Howell. Existing faculty were tired from teaching the heavy loads of returning veterans and stretched thin. But once the faculty started to grow Ernie set out to get the best students. “He was a cheerleader,” said Van Horne. “He went to the dorms to ask undergrad students to consider enrolling in the MBA Program.” He also personally interviewed student applicants.

Arbuckle left the GSB in 1968, assuring everyone the School would be better off with someone new in the dean’s chair he had occupied for 10 years. “Change is self-renewing,” he said, moving on to become chairman of Wells Fargo Bank and then at age 65 chairman of Saga Foods, the food service and restaurant firm.

On a Friday evening in 1986, driving from their Portola Valley home to their residence in Carmel, Ernie and Kitty Arbuckle were killed in a traffic accident on Highway 1.

“Ernie established the model of the businessman dean,” Dean Emeritus Robert Jaedicke said at a memorial service. “Ernie said he took the job because he didn’t know whether he could do it. That comment is typical Ernie. But he must have been the only one in the world who felt that way.” 

 

 

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