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HERE'S A VERY SIMPLE, HUMAN REASON why named, endowed professorships are so important, says Dean Thomas O'Brien of the Isenberg School of Management. It constitutes as much or more of a bottom line, he believes, as the salary enhancements, travel opportunities, research assistance, and other perquisites that such professorships provide.

It's prestige. Named professorships are invested with undeniable prestige.

The possibility of attaining such prestige "means that becoming a full professor isn't the last rung in the ladder anymore," says O'Brien. The capacity to bestow it "means that we can compete in attracting and retaining the very best faculty, and that sets a tone for the whole school."

ISOM's three new holders of named professorships (soon to be four, when the search for the Isenberg Professor is complete) are all pretty down-to-earth persons, and it's unlikely that Charles Manz, Anna Nagurney, or James Theroux would volunteer a description of themselves as tone-setters. All three, however, volunteer expressions of unmitigated pleasure in their new status.

OH, IT'S ABSOLUTELY WHY I CAME," says Manz, wooed away from Arizona State University in 1996 by the offer of the Charles `46C and Janet Nirenberg Chair in Business Leadership. Business leadership is precisely Manz's forte, but he was going great guns in it already. On the shelves of his newly furnished office, next to Dean O'Brien's on the Haigis Mall side of the ISOM building, are stacks of books representing his prolific output over the past eight years: Company of Heroes, Business Without Bosses, Mastering Self-Leadership, For Team Members Only, and SuperLeadership, which won the 1990 Stybel Peabody Prize for best book of the year. The intriguingly titled Leadership Wisdom of Jesus was published earlier this year Manz is already projecting a series: The Leadership Wisdom of Solomon, The Leadership Wisdom of Ruth, etc. and Teamwork and Group Dynamics came out this fall.

"I really believe what I write about," says Manz of his tenets that leadership is more about empowerment , collaboration, and clearing the way than it is about enforcement. "Teamwork means you don't have to do it all yourself. My work, for instance, is being done right now by others all over the country" including in Arizona, where he was "treated very well," he says, and which he had no intention of leaving "until the possibility of this chair opened up."

DOWN THE HALL , on the Newman Center side of the building, management professor James Theroux evinces more of a Lone Ranger view of the world of business. Theroux is the first incumbent of the Flavin Family Chair in Entrepreneurship, endowed by Texas business-starter Jack Flavin `59 in his own name and that of his late brother, Joe Flavin `53. What Theroux calls "quality experience," of an intense, risk-taking kind, is what he has to offer both to his students and to the Massachusetts entrepreneurs with whom they engage in mutually beneficial problem-solving exercises. Theroux left a corporate berth at PBS for the choppier waters of commercial TV, eventually founding a cable business that he grew "from zero to 150 employees" before selling it and coming to UMass.

"Once you've had an entrepreneurial success, you don't have a lot of options besides doing it again," says Theroux. "You can't go back and work for a big company after running your own show which is just so exhilarating, so fun. Yet once you've made a little money, you're not as hungry, and you have to be hungry you have to be crazed to succeed as an entrepreneur." Theroux's solution was to reenter the academy, where he could at least consort with the crazed on a regular basis. (He sometimes co-founds regional businesses just to keep from going entirely sane.) The influx of resources from the Flavin Professorship has enabled Theroux to beef up the entrepreneurship program almost as dramatically as he did his own business: hiring teaching assistants to allow him to reach twice as many people, sending more teams into the field, hiring research assistants to write entrepreneurship case-statements.

BUT IT'S FROM THE MOST RECENTLY inaugurated member of ISOM's trio of endowed professors, the occupant of a small but sunny office in the southeast corner of the school, that you'll hear the most poignant appreciation of the stature such positions confer: not only for herself, but for her students. Anna Nagurney is an internationally recognized expert on the arcane but limitlessly applicable field of networks, the complex systems of transportation, communication, and finance on which modern societies depend. The Canadian-born daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, Nagurney is bullish, in her refined way, on the quality of UMass students. The day we visited, she was revved because ISOM benefactor Eugene Isenberg, who usually recruits Ivy League MBAs, had just hired Matt Salwa, a particularly sterling product of the undergraduate program.

Last summer, Nagurney was confirmed by the university's trustees as the first John H. Smith Sr. Professor of Operations Management, funded by GM chairman Jack Smith `60 in honor of his father. When she told her students about "being able to fund more graduate students, more travel, more books, everything we care about," and also about the "favorable PR factor" that accrues to named professorships, some of them clapped their hands, "saying, `I can't believe this is happening to us!'"

-Patricia Wright

YES! A $12 MILLION FRONT DOOR," agrees Dean Thomas
O'Brien with his usual enthusiasm, when it's suggested that that's
what's on the drawing boards for the Eugene M. Isenberg School of Management. The planned addition is one of two main foci of Campaign UMass in O'Brien's enterprising corner of campus. The other is the named professorships which we treat in the main article on these pages. "Three chairs established and filled, and the fourth the Isenberg chair in search," said O'Brien this fall. "No place else on campus has that many!"

No place else on campus will have newer, shinier digs, either, once ISOM opens a 40,000 square-foot addition extending nearly twice as far along Haigis Mall as the present, 1964 building. The space will be devoted mostly to student support and instruction, O'Brien said: a student center, high-tech "case rooms," a trading room, a video conferencing room, and other sophisticated facilities. It will be funded with a combination of public and private funds, the latter seeded by $4 million of the landmark $6 million Isenberg gift announced last year. "I've got about $3 million left to raise," said O'Brien, cheerfully, in September, six weeks before Isenberg friends Harold and Bibby Alfond of Maine Alfond is the founder of Dexter Shoes made a major dent in that figure by making their own million-dollar pledge to the project.

"We want it up and running in the fall of 2002," said the dean. "We've got it on the fast track."

ENGINEERING
· Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, Michael Tsapatsis, chemical engineering.
· Outstanding Session Award of the Spring, 1997, National Meeting, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Michael Malone and Michael Doherty, chemical engineering.

FOOD AND NATURAL RESOURCES
· Editor-in-chief of Wildlife Monographs, the Wildlife Society, Todd Fuller, forestry and wildlife management.
· Science and Statistical Committee, New England Fisheries Management Council, Francis Juanes, forestry and wildlife management.
· Board of Trustees, Amherst Historical Society, Frank Lattuca, hotel, restaurant, and travel administration.
· Social Science Committee, New England Fisheries Management Council, Robert Muth, forestry and wildlife management.
· Science and Statistical Committee, New England Fisheries Management Council, Michael Ross, forestry and wildlife management.
· Outstanding Research Paper Award, American Collegiate Retailing Association, John Donnellan, consumer studies.

HUMANITIES AND FINE ARTS
· Interim Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs,
F. Javier Cevallos, Spanish and Portuguese
· Honoree, Maxwell H. Goldberg Jewish Living and Learning Community at Hillel House, Maxwell Goldberg '28, English emeritus.
· Freedom Forum Journalism Teacher of the Year Award, Karen K. List, journalism.
· President's Award for Public Service, Charles Moran, English.
· Honorary doctorate, Saint Francis College, Brooklyn, Joseph Skerrett, English.
· President, Amherst Historical Society, Ronald Story, history.
· Rea Award for the Short Story; honorary
doctorate, Colby College; John Edgar Wideman, English.
· Honorary doctorate, Massachusetts College of Art, Richard Yarde, art.

MANAGEMENT
· John F. Smith Memorial Professor, Anna Nagurney, finance and operations management.
-Finalist, Booz-Allen Global Business Book Awards, for Corporate Creativity, Alan G. Robinson, finance and operations management.

NATURAL SCIENCES
AND MATHEMATICS
· $637,000 NSF grant, $450,000 Department of Energy grant, Raymond Bradley, geosciences.
· Award for Excellence in Research, International Council on Main Group Chemistry, Robert R. Holmes, chemistry emeritus.
· Honorary doctorate, Autonomous University of Madrid, Lynn Margulis, geoscience.
· Sloan Foundation fellowship, Vincent Rotello, chemistry.
· Distinguished University Professor; $500,000 Defense Department grant; Donald Towsley, computer science.

NURSING
· President's Award for Public Service,
M. Christine King.
· President's Award for Public Service, Josephine Ryan.

PUBLIC HEALTH AND HEALTH
SCIENCES
· Heustis/Mood Award, New England Public Health Association, Gary Moore, environmental health sciences.
· President-elect, New England Public Health Association, Jesse Ortiz, environmental health sciences.

SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL
SCIENCES
· Leonard D. White Award, American Political Science Association, Craig W. Thomas, political science.
· $172,000 NSF grant, Lynnette Leidy, anthropology.

UNIVERSITY WITHOUT WALLS
· Outstanding Advisor Award, National Academic Advising Association, Marjorie Abel.

W.E.B. DU BOIS LIBRARY
· 1998 Jose Torbio Media Award, Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials, Peter Stern, Librarian for Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American studies.
· First Annual Siegfried Feller Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service, Friends of the Library, Siegfried Feller, emeritus.