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March 4, 2002
His Beautiful Mind
by Patrick Beach, Austin American-Statesman Staff
Editor's Note: This opinion piece first appeared in the March 4, 2002 edition of the Austin American-Statesman.
They made a movie about his student, but this UT economist is a legend in the world of number crunchers.
A tough-looking kid stood on Waukegan Road between Chicago and Milwaukee, his thumb aimed in the direction of the golf course where he was going to caddy.
This was in the depths of the Depression. The kid's father had lost his business. The kid quit high school to help out. The family of five lived on the west side, next to Little Italy, Division Street, rough neighborhood. Al Capone. Street gangs.
And fights. This kid knew how to fight. One summer alone he got in something like 30 scrapes. Had professional fights, too. Started at 118 pounds. Got $25 for each one. His manager was mixed up in the rackets. It helped keep the wolves from the door, as did his work spotting pins in bowling alleys.
The kid's uncle had told his mother, "That boy is gonna be a gangster."
A car pulled over and the kid hitchhiker got in. The kid and his ride started talking about a book on physiological psychology the kid had been reading to keep his edge in the ring. The ride thought: This punk looks like he's going to slit my throat and he's talking neurons and dendrons. The ride would later say the kid was the hardest-looking character he'd ever seen. And then, after getting to know each other for about a year, and after the ride urged the kid two or three times to get out of the fight game, the ride agrees to float the kid the money to attend the University of Chicago.
William Wager Cooper, the kid then, considers his chance meeting with accounting heavy hitter Eric Kohler "fortuitous," and it's a term that well applies to more than one key moment in this highly decorated University of Texas academic's life.
Initially trained as a physical chemist, he became an accountant and an economist, where his most famous work has been in an area called Data Envelopment Analysis (more about that later). More than 3,200 articles have been published spinning off a single article Cooper wrote about Data Envelopment Analysis in 1978.
He's received so many awards in his field — fields — of expertise that the professional organizations have thrown up their hands and started inventing awards to bestow upon him. He's a member of the Accounting Hall of Fame. Who knew there was an Accounting Hall of Fame?
He knew George Washington Carver. "I was a chemist, too," Cooper said, "but he left me behind in nothing flat."
He's so smart he actually taught John ("A Beautiful Mind") Nash economics.
In terms of publishing, he's busier than ever.
He's 87 years old.
University of Chicago, 1934. His family, being fond of eating, tried to talk him out of going to school. He went anyway, and his family eventually came around to his way of thinking.
He entered school on a nondegree track. No more negotiating with his fists. He stepped into a world he didn't know existed, but one to which he quickly adapted.
"There was all this intellectual conversation all around me," he said. "I was dumbfounded."
He majored in physical chemistry because the field seemed most likely to propel him toward gainful employment. But Kohler, then with Arthur Andersen & Co. (more than a half-century before Andersen would be snagged in the Enron debacle) asked his protégé to look over the math in a patent infringement case in which the accounting firm was involved in an advisory capacity.
(Asked about Andersen's involvement in Enron's collapse, Cooper said he suspects Andersen forgot its function was to serve shareholders' interests, not the company's. He thinks Andersen's prospects are "dim," and added, "I think Arthur Andersen is turning over in his grave.")
Again, it was a fortuitous moment when Cooper caught errors in the patent case math. Andersen hired him full-time during the summer and part-time during the school year, and Cooper changed his major to economics. The former fighter and dropout graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago in 1938. He believes he was the only student in his graduating class to get a job: He followed Kohler from Andersen to the Tennessee Valley Authority.
So began a remarkably accomplished and wide-ranging career. After helping Kohler prepare testimony for a joint congressional committee looking into a pre-Kohler TVA controversy, Cooper became a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University.
New York, the war years. Cooper had gone up to defend his dissertation twice, and twice it had neither been accepted nor rejected — because it was about 20 years ahead of its time. Cooper walked the streets at 3 a.m., wondering how to resolve the impasse.
"The hell with this," he thought.
With the war on, he went to Washington to work for the government, bird-dogging its accounting and accounting-related statistics programs in what is now the government's Office of Management and Budget. It was also in Washington that he had another fortuitous meeting with a stranger.
Her name was Ruth. They met at a party on 16th Street. The matchmaker forgot to introduce them. They discovered they both lived on Connecticut Avenue, albeit at opposite ends. Cooper offered to escort Ruth home. They walked. It went well enough that Ruth offered to walk him home. They walked again in the direction from which they'd just come. And so it went, back and forth, all night.
"When we showed up at my apartment at 6 a.m., my roommate practically fell over," Cooper said.
They were married in Baltimore. Cooper's brother, just back from Iwo Jima, was best man.
The commingling of business, academia and government work continued. Cooper took a pay cut to go back to the University of Chicago and teach.
Later came a move to Pittsburgh, where he helped found two schools at what's now Carnegie Mellon University. At the time, William Larimer Mellon, then chairman of Gulf Oil, was tired of sending his engineers off to business school at Harvard only to see them never return to Pittsburgh. With $6 million from Mellon, Cooper and others designed the Graduate School of Industrial Administration to give engineers new kinds of business training without leaving town. Study after study credits the industrial school with fostering structural changes in business schools across the country. The second school was a response to the urban decay that was hitting Pittsburgh and many other American cities. Thus was born the School of Urban and Public Affairs.
OK, so back to Data Envelopment Analysis. We've stalled long enough. It's basically a tool for analyzing the efficiency of any kind of system, from an army to a pencil manufacturer. To use a real-life example, it's been used to assess the efficiency of U.S. Army recruiting offices, including in Austin.
How it works isn't as important as understanding that it works on entities that have proven resistant to analysis by other means.
Tim Ruefli, now a colleague of Cooper's in UT's Business School, first met Cooper as a Ph.D. student at Carnegie.
"At first, he's very scary," Ruefli said. "You have to convince him you know what you're doing, and once he's convinced of that he'll back you. . . . If you have Bill Cooper behind you, it's a big help."
On the occasion of Cooper's 75th birthday, admirers gathered at a management conference at Carnegie to note his accomplishments. Among the speakers was George Kozmetsky, another Austinite with big ideas about successful business practices, who had this to say: "As an academic entrepreneur, Bill's inputs have had important impacts on the fields of accounting, finance, marketing, quantitative methods, managerial strategy, risk management, human resources management, management science and ethics. These contributions are legendary. They have been insightful, far-reaching and practical."
Social justice also was important to Cooper and Ruth, a lawyer. Ruth was a fighter for women's and minority rights. Cooper marched with the Black Panthers to help get more minorities in the Pittsburgh craft unions. He still wears a ring with a clenched fist, the symbol of the Panthers.
And, lest we forget, he taught John Nash, who did his pioneering work early in life, lost decades to schizophrenia and was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize. This would yield yet another distinction for Cooper. He is, so far as we know, the only member of the UT community to have taught someone later played by Russell Crowe in a film. The film, of course, is "A Beautiful Mind"; Crowe is up for an Oscar for his role as Nash.
"He was one of the few professors John Nash did not give trouble to at Carnegie," Ruefli said of Cooper. "John was no dummy. He gave some other folks fits. He was well-behaved in Cooper's class."
Nash was one of thousands of Cooper's students over the decades, so it's noteworthy that Cooper remembers him at all, but neither have kept in touch. Attempts to reach Nash for this article were unsuccessful.
Cooper and Ruth were settled in Pittsburgh. Both were busy and successful and they had a rambling farmhouse. So of course it was time to leave. After 30 years, Cooper left Carnegie for the Graduate School of Business at Harvard.
And then, at the age of 66, after five years at Harvard, he made another move, this time to UT, where he is the Foster Parker Centennial Professor Emeritus of Finance and Management. He still spends afternoons in the office, working and replying to a ceaseless deluge of e-mail queries, many of them related to Data Envelopment Analysis. Under doctors' orders, he's had to lay off the one-handed chin-ups and swims. And, at an age when one is lucky to be alive and sentient, Cooper is publishing like crazy.
"In a research career that's spanned about 60 years, the last 22 of those at the University of Texas, he co-authored or edited 22 books and monographs and published 348 refereed (peer reviewed) articles," Ruefli said. "The interesting thing is his career publication rate averaged 5.8 articles a year, which is really high. But if you look at the last decade, he's averaging eight per year. His publication rate is going up at a time when most people have quit for good. He's accelerating rather than decelerating." Cooper, when asked about the number of professional articles he's written, noted that Ruefli was not quite up-to-date. The count, he says, is now 476.
Well, what else is he going to do? Ruth died about a year ago and Cooper moved into a retirement home, whose residents are invariably surprised to find out he's still working. It's been his life. Why stop? Although he's not teaching classes just now and is technically retired, there's still writing to be done and Ph.D. candidates to supervise.
And none of this would have happened if he hadn't been hitching to the golf course that day.
"I learned from that to be prepared and take advantage of all opportunities," he said. "I learned that in fighting, too. If a guy drops his guard, you move in. If you wait until a punch is thrown, it's too late."
That wisdom, he allowed, has served him in the academy as well as the ring.
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