UVA Darden Mourns Passing of Professor Emeritus Andy Wicks

As he worked over the past year to complete his book, “Ultimate Questions,” Andy Wicks knew that it would be his final work – and potentially his most meaningful – as an academic, ethicist and philosopher.

“It is very fitting that this will be my last book and my last major publication,” he said in an interview with The Darden Report earlier this year. “It has been a tremendous joy. I didn’t understand it when I started, but it is clear to me now that this was the thing that I was put on earth to do — not necessarily just to write this specific book, but to be invested in — and articulate — this path, this way of engaging with life, this way of living these questions.”

Wicks, the Ruffin Professor Emeritus of Business Administration for the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, passed away Thursday in Colorado from a neurodegenerative disease.

In a message to the Darden community, Wicks’s longtime colleague and friend, Professor Bobby Parmar, said Andy’s wife Cathy asked the news to be shared with the School. Even with the difficult message, it included a reference that showed the wry humor that Andy Wicks possessed, along with his well-known devotion to thinking deeply about ethics and life’s purpose.

“His final moments were at home with Cathy, a lifelong hospice nurse. Andy was surrounded by the Colorado mountains he loved,” Parmar wrote in his message. “Cathy reports that he was open, light and ready to leave his body. He was surrounded by music and candles and said he was relieved that he didn’t have to watch the Tennessee vs. Alabama game. He didn’t want that to be what took him before his time.”

An ethicist with a background in religious studies, Wicks earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Tennessee, and his master’s and PhD in religious ethics from UVA.

Wicks, 62, joined Darden’s faculty in 2002 after teaching for a decade at the University of Washington School of Business.

In a message delivered to the Darden community on Monday, Dean Scott Beardsley and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research Sankaran Venkataraman said that Wicks “quickly became a beloved figure among both students and colleagues” after joining the School.

“Andy was a cherished member of our faculty, and his contributions have left an indelible mark on the UVA and Darden communities, the Academy of Management, and the business world,” Beardsley and Venkataraman wrote.

For Wicks, becoming a business professor wasn’t part of the original plan.

As a graduate student in religious studies, Wicks was headed down a path toward medical ethics or applied religious or philosophical ethics. But along the way, he met Darden Professor Ed Freeman, widely considered the father of stakeholder theory, who opened his eyes to what business ethics was all about.

Wicks would become Freeman’s research assistant, and Freeman joined Wicks’ dissertation committee. The pair went on to write three books together, in addition to a number of papers.

Freeman said in The Darden Report article earlier this year about Wicks’ forthcoming book that he was “absolutely one of my closest colleagues” and a person who lived his life “with integrity and grace, and the book reflects that — it’s like having a conversation with Andy.”

On Friday, after news of Wicks’ passing circulated, Freeman said his colleague would be missed.

“Andy was one of the most thoughtful people I’ve ever known,” he said. “He really lived the values that were important to him, and I’m grateful that I had a chance to know him and that our students had an opportunity to learn from him.”

During his time at Darden, Wicks’ leadership roles expanded to include director of the Olsson Center for Applied Ethics, academic director of the Institute for Business in Society, academic adviser for the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics and director of Darden’s Doctoral Program.

The MBA courses he taught included Business Ethics; Leadership, Values and Ethics; Faith, Religion and Responsible Management Decision Making; and Ultimate Questions and Creating Value in Business.

Based in part on the course he taught, the book “Ultimate Questions: A Stakeholder Guide to the Business of Your Life” tackles four fundamental questions: Who are we? Why are we here? What does it mean to live a good life? How should we get along with others?

In his earlier interview, Wicks said his book was a plea for people to pay attention to their lives.

“It’s an invocation for the reader,” he said. “It’s not ‘here’s the answer.’ It is really an invitation to wake up, to pay attention, and to be willing to ask those hard questions about your life, not because there’s some external critic you’ve got to satisfy, but because it helps you have the kind of life that you would like to have.”

Andy’s life was a shining example of the book’s lessons, Parmar said.

Wicks’ family requests that, instead of sending sympathy cards, friends “acknowledge Andy’s light by lighting a candle in his honor” on Nov. 1.

Lauren Foster contributed to this report.