The Manitoba business community is mourning one of its greatest champions.
Jerry Gray, long-time professor and dean at the I.H. Asper School of Business at the University of Manitoba, business consultant and a director at many Winnipeg-based businesses, died on Oct. 12 after a courageous battle with cancer. He was 83 years old.
Born in Evansville, Indiana in 1942 and educated at Southern Illinois University and the University of South Carolina, Gray moved to Winnipeg in 1970 with his new bride, Lynda, to take a teaching job with the Faculty of Commerce at the U of M. He was appointed associate dean in 1982 and he became dean in 1996, a position he held until his retirement in 2004.
Without a doubt, his signature achievement as dean was securing a $10-million investment from local media magnate Izzy Asper that resulted in the renaming of the faculty of commerce to the I.H. Asper
School of Business.
John McCallum, one of Gray’s closest friends and a long-time finance professor at the Asper School, says the association with the Asper family gave the school an identity that it lacked previously.
“That was incredibly important to us. We became Asper in the province and Asper around the Toronto
business community. Ivey is Western (University) and Asper is Manitoba. In the world of business schools, that type of identity really matters,” he says.
McCallum says the classroom part of Gray’s legacy is the more than 15,000 students whom he taught and, in many cases, counselled.
“Jerry really believed that the business school that became Asper was incredibly important to Manitoba
and its future because we were a small province with pretty good resources but we didn’t have 10 billion
barrels of oil. If we were going to have organizations that could compete internationally, the first stop for a lot of management in Manitoba was the U of M business school,” he says.
After retiring, Gray embarked on a second career of community service (in between fishing trips, of
course). He served as chair of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, president of the Manitoba Club
and chair of the Friends of Upper Fort Garry. He also served on the boards of Pollard Banknote and
Gendis Inc. as well as numerous small companies and start-ups.
Gray was regularly quoted in the media about developments at the Asper School and in the Manitoba business community. About 15 years ago, Gray organized a group of former professors from the business school to meet regularly for lunch. They were affectionately called “the geezers”.
“He led the whole thing. He was incredible at creating groups of people who liked each other and spending time with each other. Every month for years, we gathered in his garage among his Jaguar cars to have lunch and keep in touch with each other,” McCallum says.
