Value-Added Career

John Sell’s undergraduate and graduate degrees are from big, flagship state universities: Penn State and UCLA. But when the time came to set his own course as a scholar, Sell was drawn to the liberal arts, giving up a tenure track position at Cal State Northridge to come to Wooster in 1981.

“I’d been a TA at UCLA and seen what large lecture classes were like,” he says. At Northridge, he had taught smaller classes but found that his students were more concerned with technical training than a broader education.

“My interests, even from undergraduate days, were broader than that. I was interested in applications, sure, but applications start with concepts. And I’d always been interested in other things, too, like literature.” (Sell’s wife says the first time she noticed him, when they were both students at UCLA, he was arguing with a friend about the title of a Robert Frost poem.)

From the beginning, Wooster’s atmosphere proved more congenial. Veteran faculty members like Richard Reimer and Gene Pollock welcomed him into the economics department, but also introduced him to the wider campus community.

“Gene always sat at this big round table over in the corner of the faculty lounge, and I started sitting there early on because I went over there with him. So I got to know people like Jim Hodges and Vivian Holliday and Dan Calhoun. The other thing that made a difference is that we were in Kauke, and my office was actually in the language wing. I had Pablo Valencia on one side and Jim Bean on the other.”

In 24 years, Sell has advised more than 120 Independent Study projects, and has seen them become “much more sophisticated, especially in terms of what we expect of students analytically.” This year, for the first time, he had the vaguely unsettling experience of teaching the child of a former student— Jeff Wright ’05, son of Bill ’84, one of Sell’s first I.S. advisees.

Sell, whose areas of expertise include financial markets and strategic management, also advises the Jenny Investment Club, which allows students to manage a portion of the College’s endowment. And with support from The Burton D. Morgan Foundation, he is preparing to launch a new venture: a social entrepreneurship program that will teach students how to apply venture capital methodologies to not-for-profit activities. The program will include a revolving fund from which students will loan local agencies seed money for profit-making ventures to support their not-for-profit mission.

In 2001, Sell was named the first James R. Wilson Professor of Business Economics, a new professorship endowed by James R. and Linda R. Wilson.

“I’m not a very ego-driven person,” Sell says, “but being named to an endowed chair is very nice because it shows, in a tangible way, that one’s activities are not only personally meaningful, but valuable to the College as well.”

The Wilsons also endowed a fund that allows the College to bring to campus distinguished business and financial leaders like Preston Martin, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, and Peter Guber, CEO of Mandalay Entertainment Group.

“We bring these speakers in and they do classes; they’re not just coming in for a keynote,” Sell says. “Students get direct access that they wouldn’t otherwise have to people at this level. Real access. They’re sitting in a classroom with 20 students.”