A Thanksgiving memory of a great teacher
UNI economics professor imparted lessons on students and community
CEDAR FALLS — I headed out for a Thanksgiving Eve morning workout in a vain attempt to stave off the inevitable “Buddha belly” from the upcoming holiday feast — and maybe assuage my finely honed Catholic guilt complex over it.
I headed in the general direction of the mostly deserted University of Northern Iowa campus. It reminded me of one Thanksgiving Eve class I DIDN’T have as UNI undergrad ages ago. And it made me smile.
The class was Principles of Economics. The professor was economics department head Bruce Wylie Anderson, known in the community as simply Wylie. I got to know him much better years later when he was a columnist for the Cedar Falls Record and Waterloo Courier - and a frequently quoted expert source for stories I did as the paper’s business editor.
But as an 18-year-old college freshman, economics was a big “yick” — something you had to take for general education credit.
And Wylie looked like what I expected an economics professor to look like. He was all spit and polish in a business suit — definitely not one of the hippie profs of that day who dressed down and liked to schmooze with students. I wasn’t expecting much other than to survive.
Well, if profs ever get points for stage presence, performance art and plain old diligence as a tool to drive home a lesson, Wylie deserved a bunch.
He got the students’ attention early on in the class when he announced he would award an automatic “A” to anyone in the class who could name all of the members of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve. Not just the chairman, who at that time was Arthur Burns. All of them. Without looking it up. This was the prehistoric days before Google and smart phones.
Wylie never had to pay out. Not in our class. Probably not ever.
Wylie earned every bit of his pay handling that big class and breaking down the principles of economics for us.
I still remember what he drilled into us: "Con-SUMP-tion is a FUNC-tion of IN-come." He had us recite it over and over again, like a mantra. If we didn’t learn another thing in his class, he said he wanted us to remember that.
A couple of days before Thanksgiving break he told us: "Now we WILL be having class Wednesday (Thanksgiving eve). But I won't be taking attendance -- LIKE I NORMALLY DO."
He never did take attendance in that big lecture hall, of course.
But a few of us "towners" who didn't have to travel for the holiday showed up anyway. Wylie stuck his head in the door at the front of the classroom and said, "Whaddya guys doin' here? Get outta here, before I come back and lecture to ya!"
He closed the door, and we left.
That was pretty cool, and it still makes me smile.
Wylie really was a pretty down to earth guy. I saw that when I attended a UNI Artists Series performance by the great Emmy-winning actor Hal Holbrook in his one-man show, “Mark Twain Tonight,” in the Old Auditorium building, now Lang Hall. Wylie was sitting few rows below me in the balcony, laughing his head off like the rest of us as Holbrook brought the curmudgeonly hilarious Twain to life for us.
Wylie wasn’t aloof in an academic ivory tower. He was deeply involved in the community, serving on local bank boards, talking to civic groups, lending his expertise whenever he could. He really came through in a column he wrote in the Courier during the bitter five-month strike and lockout between John Deere and the United Auto Workers in 1986-87, in the depths of that decade’s recession and farm crisis.
"The John Deere strike must come to an end," Anderson wrote in a column published in the Courier on Jan. 11, 1987. "It is not out of line for I as a citizen to ask each of these sides to compromise. ... What I do know is that the longer this conflict continues, the longer the union members are unemployed, the longer the company loses money, the more drastic will be its impact upon my community and my state's economic well-being."
"It does no good to gloat from satisfaction which may be received by 'winning,' " Anderson continued, "if in the process the boat sinks. We are all going to drown if that is the case." The dispute was settled a month later.
"I tried to walk down that middle if I could and still say what I thought had to be said. That was important, I thought.” he said of the column in 2000 after his retirement from UNI. He received universal praise and respect. He spoke for many. He was the right guy in the right place at the right time -- just when the town needed him.
Wylie, a native of Colorado and U.S. Army veteran, pretty much created the UNI economic department and devoted more than 30 years to it. He encouraged critical thinking from a humanistic, humanitarian perspective be taught along with the quantitative side of the science. Profit for its own sake is not the goal, but rather, what it can accomplish in terms of generating wealth and well being for company, workers citizens and community.
Wylie passed away in 2020 but a lot of his students and colleagues remember his lessons and example. We still have economic issues today including layoffs and a lack of generational wealth among many. Consumption is still indeed a function of income. Some are just “functioning” better than others. The more we can help more people to do that, get them on the track to generate commerce, wealth and self-sufficiency, the better off we all will be.
Wylie Anderson would be the first to say that’s more important than naming all the Federal Reserve governors or holding class on a holiday eve.
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. They are listed below. Clink on the links to check them out, subscribe for free - and, if you believe in the value of quality journalism, support this column and/or any of theirs with a paid subscription .
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I would have given my eye teeth for a Prof, like that! I gave econ three chances before I gave up completely! I lived in a world of reality where things had to connect directly tosomething I could put my fingers on! Economic Theory never has a chance of convincing me they had a clue of the reality I faced!