Bluffton remembers Raid as educator, innovator, entrepreneur
When Howard Raid came to Bluffton College in 1947 to teach economics and business, he was told to expect a geography class added to his teaching load, based on the low number of students anticipated in business courses.
But 50 students-about one-sixth of Bluffton's total enrollment at the time-signed up for economics courses, and the first business and economics department at a Mennonite college was poised for growth.
By the time Raid retired in 1979, Bluffton had produced nearly 450 graduates with a major or minor in business or economics. That number has since passed 1,600, plus another 220 graduates of the university's master's degree programs in business administration and organizational management.
The business boom at Bluffton is part of the Raid legacy, celebrated May 8 at a May Day event in the university's Musselman Library. Reflecting on "Business, Finance and Bluffton: The Legacy of Dr. Howard Raid" were his daughter, writer and editor Elizabeth Raid; Dr. Donald Pannabecker, vice president and dean of academic affairs emeritus; and Dr. George Lehman, who is beginning his second five-year term as Bluffton's Howard Raid Professor of Business. Lehman is also chair of Bluffton's economics, business administration and accounting department and director of graduate programs in business.
A 1966 Bluffton graduate, Elizabeth Raid is writing a book about her father, who was an ordained Mennonite minister and entrepreneur as well as an educator. Seeing the need for gravel roads in his native Iowa, Raid and his three younger brothers started a stone quarry business in 1946. He then applied the family business model to establishing Bluffton's business and economics department when President Lloyd Ramseyer hired him the following year.
"He answered Ramseyer's ad in The Mennonite magazine," said his daughter, adding that a letter from the president asking him to teach-with no mention of salary-was his only contract.
Raid, who earned his Ph.D. in economics from Ohio State University in 1953, expected students to be responsible for their own education and to read the Wall Street Journal every day, Elizabeth Raid said. And his expectations extended beyond graduation, she continued, saying alumni were expected to serve their communities, churches and other organizations because that went along with success in the business world. He believed that graduates, with business skills they learned at Bluffton, could serve any organization-for-profit or nonprofit-anywhere, his daughter said.
Raid explored different teaching methods and took students on field trips to Mennonite-owned businesses in Kidron and Archbold, Ohio, and Berne, Ind.
"The practice preempted the academic," Elizabeth Raid explained, recounting her father's 1961 purchase, with several local businessmen, of the Bluffton Slaw Cutter Co., which became a hands-on business laboratory for Bluffton students. To teach them about markets and money management, he organized the Boom or Bust Investment Club as well.
Also an alumnus, but a psychology major who never took a class from Raid, Lehman returned to Bluffton in 1994, 25 years after graduating and after roughly 20 years as an administrator at Prairie View Hospital in Newton, Kan. Ten years later, in 2004, he was appointed to his initial five-year term as Howard Raid Professor of Business.
Lehman said he had wondered what holding the endowed chair meant, but soon learned that it entailed access to training funds plus an obligation to deliver the annual Howard Raid Endowed Chair Lecture.
Among his lectures have been a review of management literature from a Christian perspective and discussions of the candy-making Cadburys, from a Quaker background in England, and American Milton Hershey, who grew up in a Mennonite context. The training funds, meanwhile, have allowed for learning experiences in London and Northern Ireland and at an International Association of Business Schools conference in Orlando and, last year, a Mennonite conference in Paraguay.
But beyond those benefits, having the title also means "you become the keeper of the name," Lehman said. After perusing the Howard Raid Mutual Aid Archives at Bluffton and reading Elizabeth Raid's writing about her father, "I feel like I know Howard more personally than I actually knew him."
Through the position, he added, he has come to think of himself more as a scholar as well. "It's changed my life as an academic."
PHOTO - Remembering the legacy of Dr. Howard Raid at Bluffton University on May 8 were (left to right) Dr. George Lehman, Bluffton's Howard Raid Professor of Business; Raid's daughter, writer and editor Elizabeth Raid; and Dr. Donald Pannabecker, vice president and dean of academic affairs emeritus at Bluffton.
