Excerpts from this interview appear in the January 2008 issue of Kaizen, CEE’s newsletter. Below is the full interview.

Michael Newberry’s painting career has spanned three decades. He has exhibited throughout Europe and the United States and taught life drawing, drawing and composition, and painting at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. He has established the Newberry Workshop, sharing his knowledge through a series of online mini-tutorials. He has also published several essays and lectures on aesthetics and the philosophy of art.

Kaizen: When did you first become interested in painting and start thinking about it as a possible career?

Newberry: I started painting when I was about eleven, after falling in love with Rembrandt’s art work. My grandmother bought me a book of his work for my birthday. I enjoyed going through it, and I began drawing and painting. But as far as a career, that didn’t happen until much later, in my twenties, when I started examining what the life of an artist would be and whether or not I had the skills to make it worthwhile to follow up on painting.

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A recent article in The New York Times reports that more colleges are now offering courses and programs in entrepreneurship, giving students the first-hand experience of starting and running their own business: “According to the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Mo., more than 2,000 colleges and universities now offer at least a class and often an entire course of study in entrepreneurship. That is up from 253 institutions offering such courses in 1985. More than 200,000 students are enrolled in such courses, compared with 16,000 in 1985.”

According to the most recent Non-Employer Statistics published the U.S. Census Bureau, on average 2,356 people go into business for themselves every day. Their firms account for 78 percent of U.S. businesses and $951 billion in receipts.

“Among the fastest-growing industries are Web search portals (41.2 percent), Internet service providers (16.6 percent), nail salons (18 percent), electronic shopping and mail-order houses (12 percent), recreational vehicle dealers (12.1 percent) and landscaping services (11.1 percent).” The top five states in terms of growth in small businesses between 2004 and 2005 were the District of Columbia (9.6 percent), Nevada (7.7 percent), Florida (7.6 percent), Georgia (7.6 percent) and Utah (7.2 percent).

Philosophy professor Stephen Hicks and economics professor Robert von der Ohe will co-teach a new course this fall 2008 semester at Rockford College: Entrepreneurship and Ethics. The purpose of this course is to integrate entrepreneurship, business history, and business ethics. It will consist of case studies of major entrepreneurs in modern history, e.g., Commodore Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Samuel Insull, John Johnson, Martha Stewart, Bill Gates, and others. Part of each case study involves learning the entrepreneur’s business practices and how he or she achieved business success. What traits and practices did they have: intelligence, risk-tolerance, leadership, ambition, ruthlessness? And part of each case study will involve learning about the ethical controversies their activities generated: Were they “predatory competitors,” “monopolists,” “robber barons”—or were they extraordinarily productive individuals who benefited both themselves and their customers? Students read and analyze business histories and biographies by both proponents and detractors. See the Entrepreneurship and Ethics course flyer.