Matthew Miller

mrmiller@lsj.com

Mordechai Kreinin has a small wooden clock on his desk in Michigan State University's Marshall-Adams Hall. It was given to him seven years ago in recognition of "50 years of outstanding service." It is stopped now, its hands showing fourteen minutes past eleven.

"I lectured around the world God knows how many times," Kreinin said. He sat behind his desk, dressed in a button down shirt and track pants, gesturing as he talked. "I wrote books and articles. I consulted, did a million things. And I did my classes. I thought I had an interesting life, professional life, so I didn't see any urge to retire."

Kreinin, who goes by Max, has been teaching economics at MSU since 1957, since the autumn when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and the 101st U.S. Airborne Division escorted nine black students into Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.

He is almost certainly the longest-serving professor in the university's history. He is among the most important international economists of his generation, an outsized personality in an economics department once known for its outsized personalities. And, on Jan. 20, the day of his 85th birthday, he will retire.

"Eighty-five is about time," he said, "57 years at MSU."

Strange and goofy

Kreinin's journey toward retirement has not been marked by idleness. He published his 15th book, a co-edited volume title "The Oxford Handbook of International Commercial Policy," in 2012. He published his 167th academic article, "Openness to Import and Productivity," in the journal "The Global Economy" last fall and has another in the pipeline.

He did stop teaching after the fall of 2011, but he spent the decades prior teaching macroeconomics and international economics courses to packed lecture halls.

As a teacher, Kreinin told corny jokes. He handed out pennies to students who asked questions and nickels to the ones who had the courage to criticize him, "even if they were wrong." He sang, mostly songs from the musical "My Fair Lady."

"After I explain a difficult concept, I sing to them, 'It's second nature to me now... It almost makes the day begin.'" he said. They're lyrics from "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face."

"You have to be an actor," he said, "at least in part."

Everyone asks him how undergraduates have changed over 50 years. Not in any profound way is his answer.

"I think undergraduates are here to study and have fun" he said, "and they succeed."

He has, after all, taught tens of thousands of them.

"I still remember him coming into class, seemingly always flustered with his shirt untucked beneath his suit coat and usually wearing a tie that never stood a chance of matching anything at all," said Greg Domsic, who was among Kreinin's last students.

But, if Kreinin seemed strange or goofy at times, "I could tell how intelligent he was, and I always strived to understand just a portion of what he understood," Domsic said. His class in international economics "was one of the most challenging courses I took at MSU, and I probably learned more from him than any other professor there."

Kreinin was born in a small town near Tel Aviv in what was then Palestine. As a teenager, he was part of the Jewish resistance movement against the British, who had administered the territory since shortly after World War I, though "young people like me that were in their teens were not in a shooting capacity."

After the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, he served in the Israeli army, fought in the Arab-Israeli War. He earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Tel Aviv and then came to the University of Michigan for his graduate work.

"For one year, I taught in the department," he said. "The teaching went rather well, so that's when I decided that's maybe my mission in life."

The offer he got from MSU "looked attractive enough."

Kreinin arrived on a campus very different from the one he'll be leaving. In the fall of 1957, the school's proper name was Michigan State University of Agriculture and Applied Science. It had fewer than 21,000 students, 397 of whom were majoring in economics. Bogue Street was the eastern border of the campus and, apart from some soon-to-be razed apartments east of Harrison Road, the buildings petered out south of Shaw Lane.

But, as Kreinin put it, "There was growth in the air." Under President John Hannah, the university was adding new students and new buildings at an explosive pace.

Kreinin quickly became one of its rising stars, prolific, wide ranging in his interests. He did early work on European economic integration. He authored a widely used international economics textbook that has been in print since 1971. Together with J. Michael Finger, he created the Finger-Kreinin Index, a measure of export similarity between countries that is still used. And he once saved Michigan State University, in a manner of speaking.

That happened amid the economic crisis of the early 1980s. Facing huge budget shortfalls, the university was preparing to fire as many as 100 tenured faculty members, to slash academic programs. The possibility was roiling the campus.

At at a meeting of the Faculty Council and the Council of the Deans that spring, Kreinin stood up and said, "I think we've had enough confrontation. We've got to find a way out of this morass."

He proposed a voluntary buy out program, something the university made use of. The idea took. The university avoided the opprobrium that would have come with firing tenured professors.

One professor, unnamed in the contemporaneous account from the Lansing State Journal, said "I would be willing to call Max the savior of Michigan State University. He saved the administration from itself."

'The savior of MSU'

Kreinin has spent time as a visiting professor at at least a dozen universities, and it was during a stint at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia in the late 1980s that he began one of the most influential projects of his career.

"In the 1970s, we all thought that the Japanese were 10 feet tall," Kreinin said. "American corporations were continuously complaining that the Japanese market is closed to them. The U.S. government raised the issue with the Japanese government, and the Japanese government's answer was very simple: just look at the books. We have no restrictions. Our tariffs are low."

During his time in Australia, he decided to look more carefully at the issue, to go out and ask the multinational companies operating in Australia how they went about sourcing their materials, machinery, anything they bought.

What he found, and later wrote, is that Japanese companies ''are tightly controlled by the respective parent company, procure their equipment mainly in Japan and own and operate mainly Japanese machinery," a system known as keiretsu that largely shut American companies out.

"When I published that, the U.S. trade negotiators read that, it opened their eyes," he said. "Suddenly we understand what's going on."

Michael Plummer, a professor of international economics at The Johns Hopkins University, one of Kreinin's former graduate students and one of his most frequent collaborators said, it's "very odd for an economist to talk to his or her data. We just don't do that." But Kreinin saw a problem, a question, and went to find the answer.

"When I think of Max, I think of that."

He also thinks of an episode that took place when he was Kreinin's teaching assistant. A student came to complain about a low grade, saying it would prevent her from getting into business school. When Plummer declined to raise it, she returned with her father.

The result was the same. The woman and her father left upset. Plummer felt compelled to tell Kreinin.

"He said, without balking, 'Tell her that her getting into business school is a function of her grades. Her grades are not a function of her getting into business school.'"

Kreinin does not plan to stop working when he retires, not entirely. In recent years, he has taken it upon himself to mentor younger scholars, to guide them through projects and academic politics. He plans to continue.

Kreinen has been "a model of how to age gracefully," said Carl Davidson, chair of the economics department at MSU. Without him, the department will be "quieter, less jolly".

"It's going to take some adjustment," he said, "although I don't think we're really going to be without him, because he'll have an office as a professor emeritus. My guess is we'll still see him every day."