In Half Century, Northwood goes from 70 Students to 33,000 Graduates
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Arthur E. Turner, above left, and R. Gary Stauffer, in montage with first building in Alma and Alden B. Dow, left, architect of the Midland campus.
Northwood University celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2009 and moves into its second half-century with four campuses and an international presence.
Arthur E. Turner and R. (Richard) Gary Stauffer were admissions counselors at Alma College when the Russians launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957.
That event shook the U.S. educational establishment, causing a new focus on math and science to the detriment of programs like business.
When Alma followed suit and downgraded its business programs, Turner and Stauffer left the Presbyterian-oriented college and opened a private business school in the old historic Ammi Wright mansion then owned by Turner's father-in-law, Wesley Jordan.
Using mostly borrowed $100,000, the founders set up the the new school less than a mile from the venerable Alma campus, and scored an instant success. Besides general business studies, the institute focused on secretarial and retailing.
The school quickly drew about 70 students who wanted to concentrate on business classes. The next year about 125 signed up. Within two years a new campus was opened in Midland with a wooded 268 acre campus, new buildings and a substantial annual endowment from the local community and its businesses, industries and foundations. It was Midland's version of economic development, bringing the sons and daughters of auto dealers and other wealthy folks to their city. Over the first decade the institute grew to nearly 1,000 students.
Turner, a lay Presbyterian minister and spellbinding speaker, and Stauffer a former high school basketball coach, were fundraising marvels. Turner spent two years in graduate school at Wayne State University speaking in suburban Detroit churches and captured the hearts of the wealthy and successful donors who supported free enterprise vocational education rather than arcane and anti-establishment thought promulgated by many colleges.
Without an endowment or funding base of wealthy alumni like schools founded a century or more ago, Northwood had to make up for lost time. According to longtime observers of the school, the first fund-raising targets were Indianapolis and Detroit area tycoons with no children and no strong ties to existing universities.
Wealthy and famous people, enchanted by the idea of a college with a focus on business and free enterprise, signed on as donors and supporters. These included former U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Texas oil baron Clint Murchison, owner of the Dallas Cowboys pro football team, Dallas doyen Evelyn Lambert, famed architect Alden B. Dow of Midland, Jean and Jerry Hoxie, noted tennis coaches of Hamtramck, Macauley and Helen Dow Whiting of Midland and others.
For several decades Northwood has honored dozens of "distinguished women" and "outstanding business leaders" at events in prestigious venues like the Pierre Hotel, New York City, the Westin Galleria in Dallas, an upcoming event at The Breakers, Palm Beach, Florida, and other tony locales. The events serve as a basis for fundraising efforts and for promoting the university's mission and growth, making the awarding of a few honorary degrees each year by many colleges pale by comparison.
Texas Monthly in 1986 featured the Northwood founders with a multi-page spread as an "ultimate charity success story." The spread noted a Northwood Texas campus fundraising event with actress Joan Collins as guest hostess, that honored Princess Sophie Wurttemberg and big bucks Dallas developer Henry S. Wilson, and auctioned a Rolls Royce and "his and hers" BMWs. The school was regularly featured in the Dallas Morning News society pages for its glitsy social events.
Turner was seen more often in black tie than mortar board but the fundraising, based on consulting advice from former Central Michigan University President Charles Anspach, was what provided the capital to grow the school and its multiple campuses.
In 1965, at age 34, Turner was named by the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce as one of the Ten Outstanding Young Men of the United States.
Mid-Michigan, certainly, had seen nothing like it since Herbert H. Dow arrived in the 1890s and turned salt brine wells into a multi-billion dollar industrial empire named The Dow Chemical Co.
Texas Monthly writer Peter Applebome, national correspondent in Houston for the New York Times, got out his scalpel, perhaps out of jealous envy for the school's success, headlining "How Did A Glorified Trade School Named Northwood Become the Darling of Dallas Society?"
Applebome reported that Dow had funded most of a $1.8 million sports complex in Midland as well as a $4 million campus center in West Palm Beach, Florida. Applebome quoted an auto dealer who called Turner "the P.T. Barnum of American education."
The school offered a bachelor of business administration degree (BBA) initially, along with specialized automotive marketing programs through a cooperative venture with the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) and the Automotive Aftermarket Association. Through the DeVos Graduate School of Management, Northwood now offers advanced degrees.
Along the way Northwood operated programs briefly in several countries in South America, California, Detroit, and West Baden, Indiana, as well as the main campus in Midland.
Today the school has four residential campuses: Midland (opened in 1961), Cedar Hill, Texas (opened in 1966), West Palm Beach, Florida (opened in 1984) and a joint program with Hotel Institute Montreux in Montreux, Switzerland began in 2001.
Northwood's University College program centers have expanded to a total of 40 locations in eight states and program centers were begun recently in Bahrain, Malaysia, People's Republic of China, Sri Lanka, and Switzerland.
Northwood has a Bay City presence in rented quarters in the Bay-Arenac Intermediate School District, 4228 S. Two Mile Road, and has an office in a strip mall in Saginaw at 5815 Bay Road.
Northwood enrolls about 1,950 undergraduates at estimated annual cost of $18,000 per year, comparable to many public universities. It claims 33,000 graduates including Dick DeVos, the son of Richard DeVos, co-founder of Amway Corp., and several national sports stars.
Latching onto a slogan from its public relations department in the 1960s, headed by Paul Sutton, a former Dow Chemical wordsmith, "The Northwood Idea" became the school's watchword. It now publishes a quarterly magazine using that name.
"The Northwood Idea, a phrase that like all great incantations is specific enough to mean something but vague enough not to mean too much," wrote Applebome.
Applebome interviewed former Northwood President David E. Fry, now retired at age 66, who defined "The Northwood Idea" as "a quality education for management in the context of free enterprise with an appreciation of the artistic and creative spirit of mankind."
After decades of growing pains, Northwood has achieved parity with many long-established schools both in academics and athletics. It competes in the Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Association, headed for several years by former basketball coach and Northwood assistant to the president Thomas J. Brown, of Linwood. Brown was succeeded as GLIAC commissioner last July by Dell Robinson, former associate commissioner of the Mid-American Conference (MAC). The league's office is at 1110 Washington Avenue in Bay City.
In 2006 Dr. Keith E. Pretty became president and CEO of the university. A graduate of Western Michigan University and the Thomas E. Cooley Law School, Pretty has an impressive record, having been a lobbyist for oil companies in Washington, assistant to the minority leader of the Michigan Senate, vice president and chief fundraiser for Western Michigan University, and president of Walsh Business College in Troy. Former Michigan Gov. John Engler named Pretty to design a state Department of Career Development to match Michigan's educational resources to its business needs. He succeeded Fry who took over in 1982 after the retirement of Turner. Co-founder with Turner, Stauffer had served as vice president. Stauffer died in 1996 at age 69 and Turner died in 2002 at age 78.
Writer Applebome summed up: "Northwood is one of the more antic footnotes to the revival of the business ethic. No one has ever promoted, tub thumped, marketed and sold a school the way the Northwood founders have. No one in academia has ever cultivated a powerful and wealthy constituency with as much shrewdness and verve. If one were going to invent an academic success story for the entrepreneurial age, it would be hard to come up with a quirkier one that the saga of Northwood's plucky march toward fortune, if not fame."
If the first 50 years of Northwood have seen epic development and growth, the second 50 may be hard to imagine. The promoters of the Great Lakes Bay Region's economic development could learn some lessons from Northwood's history. ###
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