Pride in Payback

Over the 18 years she was with 3M, she held several leadership positions in Germany, Belgium, and the Asia Pacific region. Thanks to having had the deceptively instructive opportunity to run a small shop in her college dorm, she always knew that being up front about her expectations would serve her and her employees well in the end: “If you don’t address problems quickly, it gets way more complicated.”

Throughout college, Cindy attended countless art exhibitions and musical events with friends. Jay joined her when he came to UW to pursue a graduate degree in chemical engineering after he graduated from Purdue. Now a practicing mixed media artist as well as an active supporter of several Twin Cities arts organizations—including board positions at the White Bear Center for the Arts and the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota (where she also earned her MBA)—Cindy credits the tremendous variety of ideas she was exposed to at the UW with helping her develop broad knowledge and imagination. “I think this is Wisconsin’s secret sauce: Whether we’re forced to interact with people in other disciplines by virtue of living together in a dorm, interacting socially, being squished together between two lakes,” or somehow just catching wind of different pursuits happening around the University—she laughs, recalling how breezes wafting over to her at Liz Waters from the campus farm made her more aware of agricultural activity—“we’re exposed to so many new things. I really believe that unless you have good background in a number of different disciplines, you can’t be a good problem-solver. You need both sides of your brain—the creative side and the business side—working together to solve problems.”

These days, Cindy enjoys sparking new creative connections between “people, organizations, money, and ideas.” As a member of the Dean’s Advisory Board and campaign co-chair for the Wisconsin School of Business, she is closely involved in helping the School continue expanding support for cutting-edge research and innovative learning, as well as increasing its ability to ensure that promising students can flourish at the WSB, regardless of financial need. She and Jay have also jointly created new professorships in both of their respective colleges. The Cynthia and Jay Ihlenfeld Professorship for Inspired Learning in Business will allow a deserving professor at WSB to research and develop novel teaching methods. “We’re always looking for new ways to teach theory in a more meaningful manner. How can we make ideas sink in better? Create a richer and more enjoyable experience for students?” says Cindy, describing the driving idea behind this newly endowed chair. The Jay and Cynthia Ihlenfeld Professorship Fund in the College of Engineering will enable an engineering professor to explore various ways of adapting teaching to suit students with different learning styles. Jay, a former senior vice president at 3M who oversaw Asian operations prior to retiring in 2012, explains the logic here: “When you work for a company for a long time—and I worked for 3M for 34 years—you find out that people learn in different ways and you have to change how you get information to them,” he says. “We have to do the same thing at the University. We want to look at how we can tailor teaching methods to students’ learning capacities, with the idea of—rather than washing them out—how to do you get them through?”

The Ihlenfelds are confident that current and future partnerships between the University and a variety of businesses will go a long way toward helping the UW and its graduates serve society well for generations to come. Jay himself received a fellowship grant from 3M while he was studying chemical engineering at the UW. So, he knows firsthand how mutually beneficial academic-corporate partnerships can be. “To be competitive as a premier global company, you need the best talent, and for major corporations like 3M, there’s no better way to do that than to help make sure that the UW is producing students who can make a difference.” Jay says that one of the best rewards of giving back to the University of Wisconsin is that his personal contributions of time and money actually have begun to feel commensurate with the knowledge and invaluable career preparation he gained in Madison. “Engineering alums look back on their Wisconsin experience as a badge of honor. It’s a tough curriculum, and you’re slogging away in a sea of people having a lot of fun,” he says. “But when you’re done, you feel like you’ve been through boot camp—and you feel incredibly proud about it.”

Cindy is no stranger to hard work herself, and knows exactly what her husband is talking about. She also thinks it’s only fair for people who are “probably earning a lot more than they ever imagined they would” to repay the School for the “total life experience”—the vivid learning done in and out of classrooms—the UW provides all of its students. “What other organization has had a bigger impact on your life than your alma mater? Your friends, your spouse, your profession: all of these things likely developed through some course or connection you made on campus, an experience you had there. Throughout my career, I really felt the education I received in the Wisconsin School of Business informing the decisions I made, shaping values I tried, and try, to uphold. Being open, up front, trying to understand where people are coming from, working with integrity and gratitude—all of those are huge to me. But these are all really Wisconsin values, and if you’re a Wisconsin graduate, probably no other institution has had as much of a hand in shaping who you are than the University.” And given that tuition still doesn’t come close to covering the financial costs associated with providing students the kind of rich learning opportunities the UW is famous for, she adds, “Isn’t it time to start paying the School back for everything it’s given you? I think of it as payback much more than philanthropy.”