Leadership Spotlight

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A Natural Fit

The Jerome Fisher Program did not have its genesis, though, by any grand plan. In the late 1970s, the dean of the School of Engineering, Arthur E. Humphrey, felt the need to figure out just where that school was going to go. It was a small school on a campus that was deep into the liberal arts.

So Dean Humphrey convened some of the corporate leaders on his board of overseers and asked them to come up with ideas that could make the School of Engineering more innovative.

"After about four months, their conclusions were several," said M&T Director William Hamilton, ENG'61, GENG'64, WG'64, who was a young Wharton professor back then (and had earlier been a mentee of Dean Humphrey as a chemical engineering student), and is now the Ralph Landau Professor of Management and Technology.

"One was that the major challenges facing not only engineering, but society, lay frequently at the intersections of engineering and other fields, not squarely in engineering disciplines," said Hamilton. "Second, as executives they had significant challenges recruiting people who could work between the worlds of engineering and business. They could get good engineers and good business minds, but getting people to work at the intersection was a challenge. "Thirdly, they thought, Penn was an ideal place to build bridges between engineering and professions, like law, business, and medicine because of the strong professional schools at Penn," he said. "M&T was the first response to the recommendations."

At the time, Donald C. Carroll was the dean at Wharton and was enthusiastically looking to integrate the School's courses with others around the University.

"Don Carroll had an engineering degree from M.I.T. and Art Humphrey had been involved with the start-up of a couple of businesses. It was a natural fit. Each from his own perspective understood the importance of combining engineering and business, and both were extremely supportive," said Hamilton. "One of the Overseers at the School of Engineering was Ralph Landau, a Penn graduate from the 1930s, who was a very successful technology entrepreneur and immediately grasped the potential of the combination. He provided support for an endowed chair, and we were off."

To lead the new M&T program, the leaders at the two schools selected Hamilton, who had been a White House Fellow and a research scientist at Sun Oil Co. He had already won a couple of campus outstanding teaching awards, too. He had three Penn degrees, in both business and engineering. Twenty-five years later, he is still at it, and enjoying the work as much as ever.

"The important payoff after all these years is that I think we have raised the level of student achievement throughout the University," said Hamilton. "This has always been the exciting part of the M&T program for me. I am a Penn person through and through, though I did stray long enough to earn a degree from the London School of Economics, just to gain some perspective of the world beyond. I have always seen the M&T program as a way to make Penn as well as Wharton a better place."

It certainly was that for Steve Polsky, ENG'86, W'86. Polsky has been a Penn person from birth, his father, Carl, having been a Wharton accounting professor since 1956.

"I met Dr. Hamilton when I was looking for schools, and he just got me excited about doing something in two different fields. My father certainly didn't discourage it," said the younger Polsky, who graduated from the M& T program in 1986. "At the time, it was the only program like it around. Now, we laugh, the people I went there with—we early alums look at the credentials of the people who have come now, and we wonder if we would have ever gotten in."

Polsky said he has mostly stayed on the business side of the technology business, building two successful companies before taking on his current role as Senior Vice President for Business Development with Edusoft, an educational software venture in San Francisco. He said the combination of courses in the M&T program has made it easy for him to get where he is.

"In the tech boom, it was good to have the perspective of both sides," he said. "But now it is even more important. To know the technology and then be able to translate it into a business plan, that is where the M&T program has been invaluable for me."

Jerome Fisher, W'53, himself said he would have loved being in the program that now bears his name, that it would have served him well in his career.

"I majored in industrial engineering at Penn, and I have long been a strong advocate of two-degree programs," said Fisher, the founder of the Nine West Group, now a part of Jones Apparel, who donated $5.5 million in 1995 to endow and support the M&T program. "I was always interested in operations. We operated plants all over the world, and as an engineer, I was glad I knew what those plants were doing. It was my dream to be able to endow a program with such high-level students doing a broad spectrum of things.

"When I come back to Penn, I always say, 'I could have invested the money and had great financial returns. But seeing you sitting there and knowing what you are going to do after you leave here, I am getting the benefit of my greatest return.'"