Friends of the University

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Andre Delbecq, a Toledo native who was a business management professor and former dean of business and administration at the Santa Clara University in California, died Oct. 12 in Stanford University Medical Center. He was 80.
 
The cause of death was pancreatic cancer diagnosed about eight days before he died, said his wife, Mili Delbecq ’78.
 
“He had surgery on Monday before he passed away. He never recovered from the surgery, which was a surprise to the surgeon and everyone else,” she said.
 
Mr. Delbecq graduated from Central Catholic High School in 1954 and received a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Toledo four years later. He returned to UT in 1963 to teach business classes for three years after obtaining masters and doctoral degrees in business administration from Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind.
 
His classmates from Central Catholic, which included the Rev. James Bacik, said Mr. Delbecq often returned to Toledo, sometimes several times a year, to visit friends. They said he was proud of his Midwestern roots and held a fondness for the city despite living nearly 3,000 miles away.
 
Mrs. Delbecq said her husband conceived the idea for the program for classes to connect business with ethics and religion after business leaders asked for it. Executives in the computer, telecommunications, and bioscience industries and others with advanced degrees were finding it difficult to reconcile their business lives with ethics and spirituality, she said.
 
“They seemed to feel the need for that and he tried to get the Jesuits to develop such a class. Finally, the president of Santa Clara told him that if you think it is needed so much than why don’t you start it,” she said.
 
From that proposal emerged the Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education. He was that center’s senior fellow when he died.
 
“He worked at the university the day before he went into the hospital. He was still active at Santa Clara as a professor and heading up some other departments in the university,” his wife said.
 
The retired pastor of Corpus Christi University Parish and now a visiting scholar at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, Father Bacik said Mr. Delbecq’s spirituality was nurtured at Central Catholic and further developed after he arrived at Santa Clara.
 
“Very early he was more into spirituality than most people, and then he developed into it being in the Jesuit environment,” he said.
 
His death is a great loss for his loved ones and the University community that he served so generously for nearly forty years. We join with André’s wife, Mili, his family, and all those who mourn his loss.
 
André’s long and distinguished career at Santa Clara University began as Dean of the Leavey School of Business, a position he held from 1979-1989. His various appointments included Director of the Institute for Spirituality of Organization Leadership, Faculty Senate President, Thomas J. and Kathleen L. McCarthy University Professor, and Senior Fellow of the Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education.  
André received numerous awards and recognition for teaching, scholarship and leadership, including President’s Recognition Awards, Extraordinary Achievement Awards, Dean’s Awards for Exceptional Teaching, Faculty Senate Professor of the Year, and most recently the Award for Sustained Excellence in Scholarship.  Leadership in his profession earned him appointments as the Eighth Dean of Fellows of the Academy of Management, President of both the Western and Midwest Academies of Management, Executive Director of the Organization Behavior Teaching Society; a listing in Who’s Who in the Management Sciences; The Distinguished Service to Management, Spirituality and Religion Award from the Academy of Management; and an honorary doctorate from the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology.
 
Notable among André’s contributions are his teaching, service, and scholarship in leadership spirituality. True to the Ignatian charism that animated him, he applied his understanding and practice of prayer, meditation and reflection to organizational leadership. He played a foundational role in developing and shaping the field of Spirituality and Business Leadership. At Santa Clara, he founded the Ignatian Faculty Forum in 2002, and for almost 15 years he led the Forum in helping to engage faculty in reflective discernment and to discover Ignatian spirituality as it is lived by faculty.  In 2013, he founded and designed the Senior Leadership Forum, a program that invites those in senior leadership at the University to explore Jesuit higher education and to reflect on their own calling as leaders in higher education. 
 
Through his generous service, exceptional teaching, professional expertise, and deep spirituality, André earned the immense respect of his students and colleagues on campus and in his profession. While we have lost a good friend, a remarkable University citizen, and an Ignatian companion on the journey, we are thankful for André’s presence in our community and celebrate his life.
 
Born Sept. 30, 1936, he attended Blessed Sacrament School. He married the former Mili Mosher on April 15, 1989.
 
He served on the board of trustees of Ascension Health, Inc., a faith-based health care organization which operates hospitals in the Detroit area.
 
Surviving are his wife, Mili; daughter, Adrienne Delbecq-Backos; brother, Jean Pierre Delbecq, and three grandchildren. He was preceded in death by a son, Jean-Marc Delbecq.

08 Nov 2018