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In 1997, just as he was easing away from his consulting work, William W. Reynolds Jr. ’61 was offered “the job of a lifetime” — directing the new William G. Rohrer Center for Management and Entrepreneurship at Rutgers University Camden (N.J.), the outreach arm to the region’s business community on behalf of Rutgers School of Business at Camden.
“My job is to coordinate outreach programs that link local businesses in an eight-county area with the services of the university,” he says. “We provide all sorts of corporate training and seminars to businesses all the way up to Fortune 500 corporations. We have established small-business councils and assistance and training for small businesses.
“The challenge is to identify a business with potential, and then coalesce teams of people with intelligence, drive, and goodwill. We’re facilitators, helping create teams that can bring business dreams to life.”
Reynolds wrote proposals that resulted in federal and state funding for the establishment of the Rutgers Business Incubator.
“This is significant because Camden is a very depressed area,” he says. “It has been named the most dangerous city in the U.S. for the past two years running, and the redevelopment of its economic base is a major priority for our region.”
The incubator has 33 tenant businesses as well as 14 virtual tenant businesses connected with it, but not housed there. The former have created about 135 jobs, and the combined payroll of these businesses is more than $6 million annually. Four of the initial tenant businesses have drawn more than $5 million in venture capital funding and moved to other sites in the state.
Rutgers Camden’s Rohrer Center, Small Business Development Center, and Business Incubator just consolidated into the Institute for Management and Executive Development. Reynolds continues to serve as executive director and Business Incubator board chair.
He was interim dean of the business school in Camden from July 2005 through February 2006.
“One of the model figures I thought about before accepting the position was Guy E. Snavely, who served as acting president of Lafayette during my freshman year,” he says. “He eased the way for Dr. Roald Bergethon, and I tried to do the same for our new dean.”
Describing himself as “a doer more than a researcher,” Reynolds had been a teacher and educational administrator prior to a more than 20-year career as founder and senior partner in a Haddonfield, N.J.-based management consulting firm.
He has fond memories of many Lafayette professors, including Cleveland E. Jauch in English, Lewis T. Stableford in biology (“they taught me to march to Thoreau’s different drummer”), and Fred W. Roeder in education.
“Lafayette offers close interaction between faculty and students,” he says. “There are innumerable opportunities for students and faculty to work together, to grow together. You share an intimate education that you just can’t find in a large university. Lafayette has always been about seeing and nourishing potential. I’ve tried to build my career on what I learned at Lafayette.”
Reynolds’ father was William Reynolds Sr. ’24, and one of his sons, William Reynolds III ’88, is a fellow English graduate, working as a researcher at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.