Reflections Magazine Issue #80 - Spring 2014 | Page 10

Campus Feature

One on One With . . .
Editor’s Note: This is a regular Reflections
article series, and this issue features longtime
Siena Heights business faculty member Bill
Blackerby, who retired as a full-time instructor
after more than 30 years and still teaches
part-time. Reflections recently sat down with
Bill to reflect on his time at Siena Heights.

1. First impressions of Siena Heights?
When I first came to Siena Heights, it
was interesting for me because on the one
hand I had attended private colleges as an
undergraduate, so I wasn’t really shocked
by the size of the place. But it was a very
interesting experience because we were
clearly a school that was in transition. We
hadn’t really been coed that long, and the
post-Vatican II Adrian Dominican faculty
members were also interesting. I remember Jen Horninga asking me, ‘How do you
tell which ones are Adrian Dominicans?’
I said, ‘Why don’t you just treat all of them
well and you don’t have to worry about it.’
When asked by my sister when she came
down to walk (she was a graduate of Southfield), she asked me, ‘What is the biggest
change at Siena since you started?’ I said
right away, ‘The students’ cars are much
nicer now than when I came to Siena.’ We
were really resource-poor. The school was
what I would call a ‘bumblebee.’ On paper,
it wasn’t supposed to fly, when you just
looked at the financial resources. Yet it
worked. And it worked well.
2. Explain your background in business, and
how you eventually started teaching in higher
education.
I started off working for General Motors as an engineering co-op student. I
waited a couple of years to see if I could
flunk out. And I didn’t. So I had to make
a decision and I left General Motors Institute, now Kettering. They had a program
at Lawrence Tech that I really thought was
a program for me. It was called industrial
management. It was a bachelor of science
(degree) with a number of industrial administration courses and it also had a

10 | Reflections Spring ’14

business degree, too. I went there and I
did pretty well. In the meantime I continued to work on the assembly line full-time
while I was finishing up at Lawrence Tech.
I became a production supervisor at GM,
and left to go work for National Bank of
Detroit. While I was at National Bank
of Detroit, I was an operational auditor.
Towards the end of that stint, I was being groomed to become an international
auditor. But with my family, it just wasn’t
appealing. My rule was, if you are on the
same continent, you can go home on the
weekends. Not so much if you’re on a differen