Instructor Myke Yest says the Selber Course delves into an important yet often neglected area of finance.
“Aaron was one of the greatest, smartest investors I ever met,” says Peter Ricchiuti. “He was the consummate value investor, always looking for things that were out of favor. I learned so much from him.”
Ricchiuti, founder and director of Burkenroad Reports, is talking about businessman and private investor Aaron Selber Jr. (BBA ’50), who died in August 2013 following a long illness. A member of the Burkenroad family by his marriage to the former Peggy Burkenroad, Selber played a major role in the family’s decision to endow Ricchiuti’s program in honor of his late father-in-law, New Orleans coffee magnate William B. Burkenroad Jr. (’23), and he remained one of the program’s biggest champions until his death.
Last semester, the Freeman School introduced a new course to pay tribute to Selber’s lifelong commitment to Tulane University. The Aaron Selber Jr. Course in Alternative Investments is a finance elective dedicated to the wide-ranging category that encompasses everything from real estate and hedge funds to commodities, derivatives and futures.
“Aaron Selber was an astute investor but also a real gentleman and an extremely loyal supporter of the A. B. Freeman School of Business,” says Ira Solomon, dean of the Freeman School. “While he will be sorely missed, this tribute to Aaron that his family has created is destined to take its place along with Burkenroad Reports as one of the most exciting and innovative educational initiatives in university business education.”
While future editions of the course may explore other areas of alternative investing, the inaugural class focused exclusively on the highly complex investing space that Selber liked best: distressed debt.
“Investors spend far more time talking about the equity of a company than they do the debt side, but the reality is that the value of the bond market is far greater than the equity markets,” says course instructor Myke Yest, professor of practice in finance. “Distressed debt was an area that Mr. Selber was
truly passionate about, so what better way to honor him than to make an entire course about distressed debt?”
Investor Dewey Corley, left, spoke about his friend Aaron Selber and his approach to distressed debt as the course’s first guest lecturer.
The course combines case studies on non-investment-grade bonds with lectures from an all-star lineup of guest speakers, including James Duplessie (MBA ’84), head of Distressed Debt Strategies at Napier Park Global Capital, and Howard Marks, co-chairman of Oaktree Capital Management and one of the nation’s leading experts on distressed securities.
Kicking off the guest lecture series in January was Dewey Corley (L ’70), Selber’s longtime friend and business partner. Corley worked with Selber’s son-in-law Robert Autenreith (E ’74, MBA ’78) and all the members of the family to help raise $1.2 million to name the course in Selber’s honor.
“Aaron was an inspirational guy,” says Corley, who met Selber in the early 1970s and became his business partner in 1998. “He cared deeply about education, about Tulane University and about investing, so I think he’d be delighted to know that this course had been established in his honor.” Ricchiuti echoes that thought.
“Aaron was always interested in creating things at Tulane that weren’t available anywhere else,” Ricchiuti says. “Burkenroad Reports was one of those things, and now I think the Selber Course is as well. When students come out of it, they’ll have a set of skills that nobody else has, and that’s something I think Aaron would be very proud of.”
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