Ties That Bind Statistics Graduate Honors Longtime Faculty Member, Friendship Through Faculty Fellowship

Nearly 55 years ago, Dr. Ersen Arseven ’74 made a life-altering choice, deciding to pursue his Ph.D. in statistics at Texas A&M University. During the past two decades, he has continued to invest in Texas A&M’s future and that of its faculty and students through various endowments, including his latest celebrating the lifelong value of faculty-student relationships by supporting faculty excellence.

As a statistician, Arseven has made a career out of solving problems by methodically analyzing the situation, pinpointing the obstacles and opportunities, and then providing solutions. As a longtime consultant based in Nyack, New York, he also keeps a close eye on disciplinary trends and those in his professional circles — first and foremost the Texas A&M Department of Statistics as his academic home.

Recently, he says he came to the alarming realization that faculty who were formerly at Texas A&M were suddenly in different places.

“I started wondering, ‘How come we can’t hang onto them?’” Arseven recalled. “For most, the answer boiled down to money and resources. I really wanted to do something to fix that.”

Arseven came up with a clever two-part solution, establishing the Patricia R. Smith and Dr. William B. Smith Faculty Fellowship for Statistics through the Texas A&M Foundation to honor one of the department’s most prominent former students and faculty members, Professor Emeritus of Statistics Dr. William B. “Bill” Smith ’60, while simultaneously supporting the teaching, research, service and professional development activities of future Texas A&M Statistics faculty.

Legacy Of Leadership

A veritable fixture in Aggieland and the Department of Statistics, Smith earned both his master’s in mathematics (1960) and Ph.D. in statistics (1966) from Texas A&M and later succeeded Dr. H.O. Hartley — the father of statistics at Texas A&M who arrived in 1963 as a distinguished professor of statistics and founded Texas A&M’s Institute of Statistics, serving as its inaugural director until his retirement in 1977 — as head of the department from 1977 to 1986. Smith also spent nearly a decade as executive associate dean in the legacy College of Science and, like Hartley, is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) as well as a former executive director of the ASA (2001-2007). In addition, Smith was a program director for the National Science Foundation Division of Mathematical Sciences (1999-2001) and is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.

As a graduate student at Texas A&M, Arseven took an advanced statistics course from Smith, who he says was cordial but kept his distance, as was customary in those academic times.

“Back in those days in the department, you could not be friendly with the professors,” Arseven explained. “The way we were able to get to know them was through progressive meals, usually breakfasts, at the various professors’ houses. By default, H.O. Hartley and his wife were the grandparents of sorts for the entire department.”

Arseven remembers sports as another way to get to know the faculty in his student days. His athletic interests revolved around basketball and volleyball, which he coached at the club level while at Texas A&M, putting him in touch with a lot of the mathematics faculty. Smith, however, preferred baseball and enjoyed overseeing the game as the umpire. As fate would have it, one of the dozens of Ph.D.s he had produced by that time happened to be Arseven’s friend and volleyball teammate.

Smith also served as a football official for 20 years, refereeing at the junior high, high school and Division II college levels throughout the state of Texas. In addition, he was a 10-year member and former chair of the Texas A&M Athletics Council.

Campus Connections

Arseven had another important connection when it came to getting to know Smith — Smith’s wife Patricia, who Arseven described as his “protecting angel and guardian” and a close friend of his and his late wife, Susan ’75, who earned her Ph.D. in computer science from Texas A&M and embarked on a pioneering career in information technology strategy and a 25-year life together with him in Nyack that was cut short by Susan’s untimely death in 2000 from breast cancer at the age of 59.

It was during his early career-forging days that Arseven says he started coming back to campus, which ultimately brought him and Smith closer. Arseven had been an associate in the department, working on a project to measure wave height and frequency of hurricanes in an effort to use the data to determine the ideal characteristics of oil derricks that could be built in the Gulf of Mexico. The project paralleled Smith’s early days working with Hartley on similar problems for NASA, including monitoring astronaut health and Landsat imagery, at a time when spaceflight was in its infancy.

In the prime of his own career, Smith was in high international demand, as evidenced by visiting positions on three continents. In addition to a visiting professor invite to a prestigious university in France in 1987, he had two lengthy Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science-funded Senior Research Fellow appointments in Japan in 1980 and 1986 as well as two Organization of American States-sponsored teaching assignments in Argentina to assist with agriculture methodologies in 1977 and 1987.

“He was always friendly, but he was busy,” Arseven recalled. “The more I came to College Station, the more that changed.”

Understated, Accomplished & Humble

Although Smith officially retired in 2003, he continued to teach graduate-level statistics courses at Texas A&M on an as-needed basis through 2018 while also helping with the master of science in analytics degree program at Houston CityCentre and the Statistical Consulting Center. Widely regarded as one of the campus' most dedicated educators, he earned the Texas A&M Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award for Teaching in 1990 as well as similar recognition from the Don and Ellie Knauss Veteran Resource and Support Center on behalf of graduating veterans in May 2018.

Equally revered for his research and service efforts, Smith was honored in 2011 with the ASA Founders Award, a coveted accolade recognizing service to the profession and limited to no more than five recipients in any given year. In 2011, the ASA featured 18,000 members. Prior to that, Smith received the 1992 Don Owen Award, presented annually by the San Antonio Chapter of the ASA to a statistician who embodies excellence in research, statistical consultation and service to the statistical community.

Even in retirement, Smith has continued to present one-day continuing education courses at the ASA's Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) each summer and serve as an expert witness in various criminal cases. He and Patricia also are credited with starting another beloved tradition in conjunction with the JSM — the annual Texas A&M Statistics Aggie Reunion that occurs each year during the popular event. What began in the Smiths' hotel room more than 45 years ago now ranks as the department's biggest event, attracting former students and faculty from all over the country to catch up with each other and the latest happenings in Texas A&M Statistics.

"The first Aggie Party was held in 1978 when the meetings were in San Diego," Patricia Smith recalled. "Bill and I decided that there were now enough A&M graduates attending the Statistics Meetings that there should be some sort of a gathering, so we went to the store and bought paper goods, water, soft drinks, beer and maybe some wine and iced everything down in the bathtub in our hotel room. Chips, dip and nuts was the food served at that gathering, which was certainly a spur of the moment thing that we decided to do!

"I am really in a state of shock that Ersen has included me in this fellowship, but I am also so very honored."

When it comes to standout statisticians and academic leaders, in Arseven's view, Smith remains second only to their shared academic mentor, Hartley.

“Bill’s accomplishment is understated in our field,” Arseven said. “He produced the most Ph.D.s after Dr. Hartley — many of them in industry, including at DuPont and Trane Co. I’m not sure anybody knows that. [Texas A&M Distinguished Professor] Ray Carroll is another.

“Even when he was the top guy, Bill never threw his weight around. He was understated, humble and accomplished a lot. He kept his eye on the students — who they were and what they were doing. If they needed help, it wouldn’t surprise me if he provided it, from statistics expertise to the financial and personal.

“I was lucky that I came to Texas A&M and studied under him, met him and his wife, and that they consider me their friend. It is an honor, and to me, this was a really great opportunity to honor him and his wife.”