Why I Do What I Do
William W. Cooper - Foster Parker Centennial Professor Emeritus of Finance and Management, Department of Information, Risk, and Operations Management (IROM)
At an age when most are planning for retirement, Bill Cooper moved to Austin to begin another chapter in his already remarkable life story. The year was 1980, and Cooper, then 66, was at Harvard Business School. Long a famous academic by then, many universities were actively seeking his services.
“I decided in favor of the business school at Texas because of the persuasive arguments made by the late Dean George Kozmetsky,” Cooper says. “Kozmetsky transformed the school from an old-boys club to a modern, high-ranking school —just as he said he would.”
In a ceremony Jan. 27, Cooper will receive the prestigious Presidential Citation from William Powers Jr., president of The University of Texas at Austin. This most recent honor will have to fight for space in an office overflowing with awards, honorary degrees and Hall-of- Fame plaques.
By all accounts, Cooper is a one-of-a-kind academic. He is the co-author of 27 books and more than 500 research papers in disciplines as wide-ranging as accounting, economics, management science and information systems. He is best known, however, as the co-creator of data envelopment analysis, an operations research method used all over the world to measure, evaluate and improve the performance of manufacturing and service operations.
“As a colleague and an academic, there is no one above Bill,” says Linda Golden, a McCombs marketing professor. “His values and integrity are unsurpassed.”
Born in 1914, Cooper seemed destined for anything but the life of a future academic star. His Chicago neighborhood was rough and tumble, and Cooper got in his fair share of scrapes. Along the way he discovered he was talented with his fists.
He dropped out of school in his sophomore year of high school. “It was the Depression,” Cooper says. “My mother dragged me out. I was the oldest, and I had to help the family.” But work was difficult to find, so Cooper turned to professional boxing, which brought in about $25 a fight. He still remembers his record: 58 wins, three losses and two draws.
A chance meeting with Eric Kohler, a well-known accountant, who picked Cooper up while hitchhiking, got him out of the ring and into the classroom. Kohler paid Cooper’s tuition at the University of Chicago.
Cooper went on to teach at the University of Chicago (1942– 46), Carnegie Mellon University (1946–76) and Harvard (1976–80). He figures he might have been the only tenured faculty member at Harvard who never graduated from high school. “They never asked me,” he says.
Tim Ruefli, a colleague of Cooper’s in the IROM Department, first met Cooper as a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon. “Bill was the best mentor a budding academic could hope for, and the best friend a mature academic could have,” Ruefli says. “His contributions to knowledge and practice —and to society—are outstanding.”
Cooper still comes to the office every day and is active with research projects. “Naturally this has all added up to a wonderful career,” he says.
