One of the best jobs I ever had, thanks to Joe Arden’s confidence in me, was as the director of corporate relations at UMUC’s new international campus in the city of Schwaebisch Gmuend (SG). It was located about 50 kilometers from Stuttgart. It was a challenge. I loved helping to try making it a success.
My life at SG campus included many roles. Teaching business and management part-time I also initiated the International Career Center by introducing the campus to companies around Germany by attending American Chamber of Commerce meetings around Germany and working with the press to promote the campus and our students.
The SG campus, based in the Bismarck Kaserne, had been the headquarters for Erwin Rommel. After WWII it became the headquarters for the U.S. Pershing Missile site located 10 kilometers away. This former German and then U.S. military base was in the heart of the town of Schwaebisch Gmuend in Baden Württemberg. The city was in charge of it and many of the buildings housed Turkish immigrants making for a cosmopolitan setting. The grounds had tennis courts, lovely gardens and a “quad” typical of a university setting.
When I arrived in SG, I was responsible to help with marketing a graduate program. I worked with Robert Jerome to determine if there was a market for our U.S. MBA. This proved to be untenable since our degree was designed for the U.S. market – specifically the accounting practices. Instead, I took on the task of public relations with the press and our advisory board as well as teaching classes.
My suite of offices on the third floor was spacious. I occupied the former offices of Erwin Rommel. It overlooked the grounds giving me a sense of seeing soldiers marching in unison below.
It was a great pleasure to work with our advisory board that consisted of city officials and prominent business leaders. It was a beautiful campus. There were residence buildings to house our students who came from many parts of the world. Our curriculum was American and taught in English.
I soon learned from my many meetings with the business community that we had a prized commodity in our students. The students were fluent in English, very capable in German and could comfortable navigate among diverse cultures. The American degree in business was also a value to companies because it focused on innovation and adapting to changing circumstances.
When scheduling field trips with companies I asked students to dress in business casual and would introduce them at the companies by stating their home countries and language skills. The SG students were a big hit. I soon received calls from the HR departments of these companies offering internships and requesting on campus visits to recruit our students. Hewlett Packard, Siemens, Weleda and Bosch were companies seeking and hire interns.
I also was successful in fundraising from companies. Some donated funds to bring new students from the collapsed Soviet Union to study at SG.
Students learned much about the organizations including their culture and way of doing things. At BMW they were astonished to learn that employees were allowed a pint of beer – on tap – in their employee cafeteria during their lunch break. It was Bavarian law to allow the consumption of a pint of beer during work hours. Field trips revealing new concept.
HP outside of Stuttgart had a mixed German/American culture. The formal German “Sie” was replaced by the informal” Du” .German employees blended into an American open- door policy. We met their U.S. CEO who literally had an open door to his office. He also mixed freely with employees by eating in their lunchroom. Many of their breakout places had rounded benches so that employees tended to be facing each other rather than look at each other’s back.
Fun field trips to Rome during spring break and the Frankfurt car show were big hits!
Frankfurt car show
A day in the Bavarian Alps to welcome the cows back in the fall and to visit Ludwig’s castles provided wholesome cultural and historic context including local cheeses and pretzels
SG had much potential in the international sense but I needed to take time out to take care of a mother who had a series of strokes and needed me.
I had anticipated that I would need to go home to take care of my mother. It was a major change but a new opportunity emerged. UMUC was to enter a new phase of innovation when the U.S. Airforce in the Asian Division asked to have UMUC teach classes remotely – online. The opportunity to teach online expanded the paper courses and now used technology to expedite the learning process. I took the training and was to become one of UMUC’s pioneers in online teaching.
Dan Bennet at the UMUC Heidelberg headquarters asked for volunteers to take the online training in 1995-96. A small group of early-adapters – myself included, took him up on it. It was a primitive online course by today’s standards. It operated as an email course with computers that still had Ram space issues and the world-wide-web concept was a small reality – still science fiction in most minds. My computer skills were self-taught and limited. Computers still crashed regularly and problem solving with the help desk was cumbersome because I did not have the vocabulary to know the difference between an icon, task bar or Ram. EEEK!
I managed to struggle through to learn and when I left SG in late 1996, I had done my first email online course with our overseas program in Vladivostok, Russia.
Before I left the European Division and SG, I took my last overseas assignment to teach in Sicily before going back to take care of my mother who was now in a rest home in Victoria B.C. Canada. She was desperately waiting from me to take care of her in her last year.
I would continue to teach for UMUC online from a log cabin on Vancouver Island in Canada. Times were changing and so was online teaching. We evolved rapidly to a web -based delivery system. Primitive by today’s standards, it improved each year. UMUC became the leader in the online education industry. That is another story to tell.
