Finance Alumnus Establishes Chair in Industrial Management

Joseph P. Bennett, BBA '51, retired former chairman of Trio Products, Incorporated, a manufacturer of plastic packaging and bottles based in Elyria, Ohio, recently established the Keenan A. Bennett Chair of Industrial Management.

The chair, which honors the memory of his late father, will enable the School of Business to support a professor engaged in the improvement of undergraduate education.

Mangement Professor Randall B. Dunham was named to the chair. His research focus includes management of organizational change, work design and distance learning.

Bennett is the third of four generations of his family to graduate from UW-Madison. His grandfather graduated in 1886, and his father graduated in 1914. His youngest son Charles earned his UW degree in 1982.

Bennett grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and after earning his undergraduate degree from UW-Madison, joined Hankins Container in Cleveland, where his father Keenan was the CEO. He established the chair “to leave a legacy to my dad,” who loved UW and helped him establish Trio Products Corporation after Hankins Container was sold.

Bennett recalls his time at Madison with great fondness, noting the late Dean Faye Elwell and Finance Professor Frank Graner as two of the individuals who most influenced his career and life.

Bennett earned his undergraduate degree in finance, investment and banking, and attended law school at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He is a long-standing supporter of UW-Madison, having previously established the Jean Wall Bennett fund in American Literature and Studies, in honor of his late first wife. He is also a member of the University of Wisconsin Foundation's Bascom Hill Society and the Wisconsin Alumni Association. He and his wife, Carol, reside in Westlake, Ohio, and spend their winters in Bray's Island, S.C.