Gloria Campbell: Trend Setter

By Stephanie Robbins Boeding ’99

GLORIA CAMPBELL HAS ALWAYS BEEN KNOWN as a forward-thinking leader in her department and across campus.

During her tenure, the Department of Business Administration, Accounting & Economics became a model for professors taking a proactive approach to student recruitment, an early-adopter of student internships, and a leader in cultivating alumni engagement.

After a storied 36.5 years, her final lecture as an associate professor of business administration and economics pressed her students to adopt a forward-looking approach in their own lives.

“If you always look forward, you’re going to have a much better vantage point of being prepared for it rather than lamenting what isn’t.”

GROWING THE NEXT GENERATION OF STUDENTS

Kim Folkers, associate professor of marketing, believes Campbell’s work in recruiting future students deserves a special mention.

“She has led the way for our department over the years—making calls, contacting students, following up—always championing the importance of building relationships with prospective students and their families,” Folkers said.

Those relationships continued once prospective students enrolled. Peter Yang ’04 worked with Campbell on a research project focusing on the impact of cellphones on potential wealth.

“Working with Professor Campbell helped me gain business acumen and develop communication skills,” said Yang, a senior manager at Ernst & Young in Houston. “She was always supportive and helped me gain confidence to present our research to a group of business leaders at the Association for Business Communication’s annual conference and helped me make my decision to go to a business school for my graduate study.”

CONNECTING STUDENTS TO REAL-WORLD EXPERIENCES

Campbell is known for building connections between the college and business communities. She built on the work of former business professor Mel Kramer, developing internships in the

Cedar Valley as an important bridge to employment.

Sarah Bailey Foster ’01 credits Campbell with helping her find an internship that defined her career.

“She cares for her students, and that’s reflected in her teaching methods,” said Foster, a community manager for the American Cancer Society. “She searched out ways to better their Wartburg experience through innovative teaching ideas, integrating real-world connections into the classroom, and placing students in unique internship experiences.”

Campbell won’t take all the credit for the top-notch internship opportunities her students experienced through the years. Their work ethic and ability to do the job asked of them made it easy to persuade internship coordinators to accept a Wartburg student.

“They’ll say that our students are more dependable and eager to do the work. They might be quieter at first but have the potential to really blossom,” Campbell said.

Campbell’s connections continued to help Foster as an alumna.

When Foster and her husband, Charles, returned to Iowa to start Fosters Mattress in Waterloo, Campbell stepped in with critical contacts to help the couple with their start-up.

“Gloria was an excellent sounding board to let us bounce ideas off, and she is always willing to share her insights on the local market and business trends,” Foster said. “We were starting from scratch, and having a wealth of knowledge in our friendship circle was a huge bonus.

“Gloria is a class act,” Foster said. “I’m blessed to have Professor Campbell in my life, as a professor, leader, mentor, and lifelong friend.”

GIVING BACK AFTER GRADUATION

When business students become alumni, they often stay in touch and become personally involved through the department’s Career Directions and Connections panel.

Campbell started the event in the mid-1990s with about 15 alumni. The annual event, held during Homecoming weekend, now draws about 20 graduates who return to help students network and identify current trends in their chosen fields.

“We try to bring back the intellectual capital they’ve developed on their jobs, to help students visualize what they do and see the variety of positions,” Campbell said.

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE

Retiring from the business department will give Gloria Campbell more time to travel to be with family.

“I have four granddaughters; two just moved to Nashville,” she said with a smile.

Campbell’s two daughters attended Wartburg: Amy Campbell-Lamb ’93 is a manager at Nationwide’s Ag division in Des Moines and is finishing her master’s degree, and Wendy Morris ’97 had been with the NBA’s corporate sponsorship marketing before moving to Nashville and having her second child. Morris’ husband, Kevin, manages a music group, the Alabama Shakes, which feels like family, too. The group recently won three Grammy awards, including Best Alternative Music Album.

 “They’re like my grandkids, too,” Campbell said.

Campbell knows first-hand the stress working mothers face. She was raising her daughters when she came to Wartburg in 1979.

“I had a 2-year-old and 6-year-old, a busy time to take on a challenge. Few women at that point were working mothers,” she says. “I have such a great respect for the young women who are juggling family responsibilities.”

Husband Carl, now retired, worked in human resources and training at John Deere.

“He’s always been very supportive,” Campbell said.

 Later in life, just before her 45th  birthday, she and Carl became parents again, this time to a son, Kevan, who graduates this year with an actuarial science degree from Drake.

Campbell hopes to devote more time to her hobbies, which include reading, cooking, and exercise.

“I like the vortex pool at The W, which is a killer,” she says. “Maybe it’s a metaphor for going against the flow sometimes!”

She also likes to follow new music and had a hand in bringing a major music festival to Wartburg’s campus last summer. Her son-in-law’s connections in music management led to landing the Gentlemen of the Road tour stop in Waverly last summer.

“The two-day Waverly stopover event for the Gentlemen of the Road stopover welcomed more than 18,000 visitors to Waverly and generated approximately $7.5 million in economic impact for the Cedar Valley,” said Travis Toliver, executive director of the Waverly Chamber of Commerce. “The overall result made Waverly an international destination on the Iowa map.”

That’s not the only way the Waverly community has benefitted from Campbell’s business expertise over the years. She has served on the Waverly Light and Power and was recently re-elected to the Waverly Health Center board of trustees. She looks forward to staying involved in the community in her retirement.

“I need to be volunteering someplace,” she says. “I’m somebody who doesn’t sit very well.”

LEADING BY EXAMPLE

Some of Campbell’s favorite classes were the ones that took students off campus to explore industries in their element. Among the front-runners: 2008’s Motorcycles and Management class, which she taught with former board of regents member Ozzie Scofield ’63.

The class traveled to a motorcycle factory in Milwaukee and the Motorcycle Hall of Fame in Columbus, Ohio.

“Gloria showed me during our May Term class that all of the ingredients that have made Wartburg important to me for more than 50 years have survived and are alive and well in our faculty,” Scofield said. “She continues the practice of professor involvement in student lives. Her enthusiasm is contagious and hard to replicate. She is the very best of what makes Wartburg a unique experience.”

Another favorite was Music Industry, which led students to the Minneapolis headquarters of Target and Best Buy. The trip gave students a unique look at an industry as it started to slip.

“When you teach a trends class, there are no ‘trends’ in management books. You have to develop your own content,” Campbell said. “What are the issues? What are the topics and technology coming forward?”

Campbell’s next chapter includes more time with her family. However, she’s still making time for a part-time position on campus as the sponsored programs administrator, which will allow her to continue to work with the faculty and community writing grants to benefit all areas of the college.

“I have no doubt that Gloria will bring the same commitment and diligence to her new position that she has focused on her teaching and advising,” Folkers said.

In fact, Campbell was networking immediately in her new post, reaching out to faculty on sabbatical for part of next year, said Folkers, “encouraging us to think creatively about ways that we could use part of our sabbatical time to partner with her on grant-writing projects.”

Always thinking forward.

Q & A with Gloria Campbell 

Q: What trends do you think we’ll see in the next 5-10-20 years?

A: Data analytics, algorithms, increasing automation of jobs, some projections say in 20 years we’ll have 40 percent fewer positions because robots can do those. I think you have to keep asking, how do you add value in an environment that’s increasingly complex, and that will be only continue to be more globalized? I think a liberal arts education fills in those gaps, because machines can’t do everything. It’s prioritizing, and doing the right things well.

Q: How has technology changed how you teach over the years?

A: To put it into perspective, one of the first classes I taught was shorthand, when you think about it, is much like texting today. Today students have access to the world through their cell phones. But unless they are curious, they miss so much. You have to ask questions and be motivated to find the answers… If you have a case to analyze, why wouldn’t you want to know as much as possible about that company and industry? It’s all there.

Q: How research has changed?

A: When I researched, you’d have the Business Periodicals Index… it was this thick… it would get you to the stacks, where you have to find the physical journal, which someone probably hid so you couldn’t get the info you needed to finish the assignment. It was an exercise in frustration and determination sometimes just to FIND data… and it was so limited and skewed. And literally today you can read anything, anywhere, because it’s probably available.