Setup/UC 270 Era
The early days of the Entrepreneurship minor (and my class) were characterized by a fairly chaotic process driven by some real visionary leaders on the campus. Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen had gotten a position in the Provost’s office overseeing Entrepreneurship, and Dr. Phil Deloria, as an Assistant Dean, was the other person who pulled me into their ongoing process to create the Entrepreneurship minor. At that point I had only been teaching at the University for a couple of years, and as I hasten to point out, I had never asked to work there. After teaching an Educational Psychology course as an emergency favor for the Psych department, I thought I would just return to my retired Navy life on the river outside of campus. But it turns out they asked me to keep teaching and create some new classes for them which I did. So it was amusing to me, just a few years later, at the absolute bottom of the faculty totem pole (Lecturer 1), to be asked to create a new gateway course, a 300-person lecture that would be the core of the newest minor on campus. In particular, it was unusual because the Minor it was to be the core for had no academic home, there is no Department of Entrepreneurship! It would simply be a minor that existed by the grace of the Provost and Dean’s office with committee members and courses loosely distributed amongst Engineering, LSA, and Ross.
I got about half a page of notes from Phil and a very short timeline, as the course needed to be in play in just a couple months for the fall semester. He told me “You better work fast because I put the course in the system today and students are registering for it.” I delivered the first version of the class to 65 students in Fall 2014 in a Dentistry lecture hall. At that point, I had one grad student as an assistant. The course was taught in the provisional code of UC-270, which is where new or unusual courses get parked to see if they work. I took a lot of risks designing the course, thinking about everything I liked and didn’t like in my many years of being a student while pursuing all of my degrees. Additionally, I brought to bear the considerable science and experience of being an Educational Psychologist trained at the number one Educational Psychology program in the nation (here at Michigan, of course). The course had the unusual feature of having no tests, simply one massive, personal, and fully absorbing project. I banked on the fact that the combination of University of Michigan students’ brilliance and my life experience would be able to ensure a unique and engaging experience where they would have no choice but to apply everything I taught them in the class, and, as I would always exhort them, “Do epic shit!”
Innovate Blue Era
For the first few years, everything was magical. Jeni Olney was hired as the supervisor of Innovate Blue which was the pseudo-department within which the minor then lived. We had staff and space and a budget, and entrepreneurship had a centralized home that spanned the campus and multiple programs. The students went crazy for the class and demand boomed. I was asked to expand enrollment, so by the third instance I was teaching two 100 person lectures back-to-back, while personally supervising every student in teams of two to five—it became overwhelming. I then had the insight to shift the class to a lecture of almost 300, with discussion format so that the student teams would always have the time to meet every Friday. This was one of many really unique features developed for the class. Students were allowed to pair up from across the entire class and move around within sections to form their groups. The hiring of 4 GSI’s also greatly enhanced my ability to supervise the teams because I had a first level triage in place so that I could get involved only with the teams that needed more advanced help. In 2018 and 2019 the entrepreneurship program at Michigan was ranked number one in the nation, and the class was in its peak form. It was too good to last.
223 On an Island
In 2018, no one realized it, but the writing was on the wall. The two entrepreneurship champions who had recruited me, Dr. Deloria and Dr. Zurbuchen, had both departed the University due to what I consider to be some pretty unprofessional treatment of them by the University. So the two leaders that I thought I would be working for and who had shared their vision with me were now gone. I worked productively side by side with Jeni Olney, and we presented some of the great things happening in my class and in Innovate Blue at a national conference. In 2018/19 our Undergraduate Entrepreneurship program at Michigan was ranked #1 in the nation! But shortly thereafter, the funding line for Innovate Blue ran out and no one renewed it and it was allowed to die in its entirety, almost overnight. So now the minor really had no academic home or support. Jeni ended up as a refugee at a desk in Ross because they volunteered to house the minor but not control it. Since my class was literally the only class everyone had to take in the minor, normally that would be a problem to have no support. But I simply provided more of my time, talent, and treasure to ensure that my students have a great experience. Within a few years, Jeni moved over to Optimize, and the new director was hired for the minor, Dr. Tim Webb. He’s been a super professional friend for his entire time on campus, but he and I both rowed side by side in a boat that we knew was poorly constructed and at some point would probably sink beneath us. Ross Business School controlled the ES-212 Entrepreneurial Business Basics course that most but not all entrepreneurship minor students had to take, and the Center for Entrepreneurship up in Engineering controlled many of the practicums that students in the minor needed to take, and my class was housed in Psychology, mostly out of convenience because I already worked there and because LSA needed skin in the game when the minor was being created.
Getting through the COVID era was wild, I had no idea if the course could continue to function under those kind of constraints, but to my students’ great credit they did fantastic work and the course continued to function well, if slightly differently. We continued to build partnerships and create innovations to make the class ever more helpful and powerful for students. But the bottom line is no one truly owned or cared about the minor, and while I made the University a million and a half dollars every time I taught the class, Psychology was not seeing that money, but they were having to fund all of its support costs. So again, the writing was on the wall.
Partners and Innovations
The number of cool ideas, inventions, and partnerships that this class spawned was actually pretty impressive. The initial design of requiring students to do a deeply personal project with personal supervision from the professor was unusual from the get-go. But then expanding into the GSI format in Fall 2016 and having them become a paraprofessional entrepreneurship education team was a great stride upward. It did require that I have the authority to hire special GSIs from places like the School of Information and the Law School and the Business School, so I could build a team that could best help the students. Allowing the students to scramble themselves among the sections was helpful in getting them to form the best teams as well as using what we call the speed dating document where each term students could enter their information about whether they were looking for a team or had an idea and wanted people to join, and this tool helped them form their teams. Other curriculum focused interventions were the project guide which eventually became almost 40 pages long and was like a giant FAQ to help them not make mistakes that others have made. If I had a dollar for every time I said “read the project guide.” The other major change that was implemented around year 3 was the phase system, because I needed something to detect the groups that were goofing off and faking it, so I required ever larger written documents with visible evidence of their progress so that I could sniff out the slackers. This ended up working really well, although occasionally one or two would sneak by until around phase 3 when the horror would become apparent and we would have some very hard talks. Interestingly, over half the teams that had backed themselves into a crisis corner managed to redeem themselves in fine fashion, and it seemed that they actually took more away from the course than the students who didn’t get themselves in crisis.
One of the most interesting things to come out of the class was that the students developed their own student organization that was devoted just to the class—a hybrid situation that I don’t think existed anywhere else in the University. This was what the students came up with to allow the student groups in the class to have easier access to rooms and University resources. Individual classes or professors don’t have short codes or any of the official characteristics required to use University resources. So creating a student organization to make this process easier for the class each term was an incredibly insightful idea. It was perhaps another example of how this class operated outside of normal boundaries, but again I always supported whatever my students came up with. Every term, new students would join the student organization and they would train each other how to fill out room requests and manage funds for student groups and projects. When they needed money I would just write them a check. And they would host pitch competitions where I would take one of my paychecks and turn it into cash and hand it out to teams that made good pitches that I thought deserved help. Depending on the semester, the group would also host speaking events and other fun things around entrepreneurship. The Entrepreneurial Creativity Club was one of the greatest things to come out of the class and the students refused to let it die when the course was killed off, so it has morphed into a new student group called IncubateM, which will continue the legacy of the course and try to provide assistance to students who want to know more about entrepreneurship or develop and incubate an idea!
The first significant partnership was with Nancy Benovich-Gilby, who was the entrepreneurship specialist in the School of Information. She suggested that we have a special showcase for my best teams and she would help me host it. She generously did so for years until she also left the University after being treated poorly. (You may be noticing a pattern here). This event eventually came to be called the “Big Show,” and was supported by Innovate Blue and then by the minor which provided us a room in Ross Business School to host it each term. Interestingly, while I was able to get many of my faculty colleagues and local entrepreneur superstars to join me as coaches and mentors for this event, none of the leadership of any of the programs ever attended. I always found that odd, because the work that these students did was so incredible. At around year 5 or 6, I actually had the parent of two of my students reach out to me and say “Dr. Fretz I just had to contact you because my kids won’t stop talking about your class and I’m so impressed with everything they’ve learned and I just want to know more about what you’re doing.” This was the start of my friendship with an extremely successful and generous man, Richard Luftig. He’s a managing partner at Capital Placement in New York City and basically he proposed having a sort of venture capital pitch contest, with his friends as judges and my teams that had produced actual prototypes could pitch like a Shark Tank and the winner would get a free account on their funding site to pursue venture funding. How cool is that? So from then on, every term until the class was killed off, he made sure to bring in a bunch of his big executive buddies to grill my students and give them a fantastic experience pitching their ideas. I was always so proud of how well they did. He also became a great reference and mentor to a number of students who were interested in the finance world. Fantastic guy. And he’s still willing to do contests with the students in the new IncubateM group, if they get that far.
The End Game
The course powered along for many more years, racking up over 5,000 students! In 2024, we celebrated our 10th anniversary/20th semester and our 5000th student! The Entrepreneurial Creativity Club hosted a wonderful Diag party for the class, which had fantastic attendance despite the rain. The University had nothing to do with the student-driven celebration. Support continued to be meager. Praise, much less contact, from leadership was non-existent. Tim Webb and Ross did support the Big Show which was appreciated. Each term there was always another crazy project “on the edge” or a ridiculous rumor someone spread. You can read about all of it in detail in the book!! I have to say, after an accidental decade in academia, for a place with so many advanced degrees, it is an awful lot like 7th grade the way some people behave. As I have said, “the writing was on the wall.” I remained focused on providing amazing experiences for my students and guiding them around the endless blockages caused by “the stewards of the status quo.” The Psychology department grew weary of supporting a class that they did not see (or approve) as a Psych class, and they carried more of the costs but did not see the benefit from the $1.5 million I made the University every time I taught it. (They paid me $10,000 to do that for them, BTW). So, once I appeared in a New York Times article as one of only two faculty members with the guts to speak on the record about negative experiences with the University’s massive DEI program, it was about a month later I was first informed that my class “wouldn’t be offered” after the subsequent term. With only one term to react, it would have been hard to re-home the course even if the other ENTR programs had cared enough to save it. They did not. Having it cross-listed in ALA with the LSA Dean SHOULD/COULD have led to it just being housed there, but SURPRISE SURPRISE, it was cancelled there too. To date, I have received multiple promises of an explanation from the LSA Dean, but no actual response. It was a sad and brutal end to a great course, despite the disrespect shown to me AND most importantly my students (past and now non-existent future), I’d do it all again. The class, and my students, were EPIC!
