By Ben Hill

If you walk through Voxman Music Building on a fall day and notice a tall gentleman with glasses practicing piano in one of the private rehearsal rooms, there’s a good chance he can give you sound financial advice.

Shane Swanson is a successful Chicago-based financial planner, but you’ll find him here because his professional journey started in the University of Iowa School of Music as an undergrad focused on trumpet performance, where he’d also meet his future wife.

An accomplished attorney and chief legal officer, Susan Bennett, was also a music major, playing the flute and piccolo across the stage from Swanson. And while their post-college careers took them into finance and corporate law, their time in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) was a life-changing gift that they both now want to pay forward.

Where the music started

Both alumni arrived at Iowa because others invested in their futures.

A first-generation student from Nebraska, Swanson enrolled at Iowa sight unseen, due to its reputation and offer of support.

“Growing up in Omaha, I knew I wanted to major in trumpet, and I auditioned for several prominent schools,” said Swanson. “I was drawn to Iowa more so by Professor James Dixon…when I got in and was able to secure a presidential scholarship and a trumpet scholarship, that enabled me to come.”

Bennett grew up in Newton, Iowa, in a family with strong University of Iowa connections. Her father earned a law degree from Iowa, and her mother earned a PhD in music education at the university. “I ended up coming for a music camp a couple of summers, and I wanted to study flute,” Bennett said. “My parents said I needed to stay in state for college, and so I applied to one place.”

Whether it was fate or the multiple music ensembles they played in that brought them together, the two connected early on in their time at Iowa and were married by graduation.

Looking back, they believe that Iowa gave them much more than credentials. Whether performing in the opera orchestra or working at Hancher Auditorium, they were exposed to people and ideas that would shape the course of their lives, and those experiences that motivated them to give back as soon as they could.

“Although there are many worthy causes, when we began to have anything to give at all, we decided to focus on what was most important to us—the University of Iowa and its School of Music,” Bennett reflected.

Swanson echoed that early commitment. “You don’t have to wait until your golden years...to start giving to causes you believe in,” he said. “We didn’t want to wait.”

Over the years, they were able to grow the impact of their giving through student support, music scholarships, and serving on advisory boards, and the couple sees their most recent pledge—in support of academic excellence in CLAS—as a way to acknowledge how faculty inspired them while helping future generations of students.

Great faculty make great universities

As important as anything they experienced at Iowa, Swanson and Bennett acknowledge faculty like Myron Welch, James Dixon, Jay Holstein, and other mentors who challenged their thinking and influenced the trajectory of their lives and careers.

Swanson recalled a musicology course, and Professor Sven Hansell’s blunt advice to him to improve his writing, which later helped him in financial advising and leadership, where communication is essential. 

To Bennett, Iowa faculty taught them less about what to think, and more about how to think—an essential aspect of their liberal arts education that would prove invaluable in both of their careers.

“The degree is just the cost of entry sometimes,” she said. “It allows you to apply for certain positions, but it's the thinking ability that gets you somewhere, and it is life-changing.”

More recently, Bennett's and Swanson’s participation on advisory boards for CLAS and the UI Center for Advancement confirm what they’d experienced: that great universities are built on great faculty.

That belief is at the heart of Academic Excellence funding, which helps CLAS invest in world-class faculty whose research, teaching, and mentorship shape the student experience every day. 

A flexible legacy that can adapt with the times

Unlike restricted gifts with a narrowly defined purpose—which can sometimes limit a fund’s impact—Bennett and Swanson see the Academic Excellence funding as a way to ensure that their support will have the greatest possible impact well into the future as higher education changes.

“Institutions today don’t just compete for students. They also have to compete for the best and brightest faculty,” said Sara Sanders, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “This support helps us recruit exceptional scholars, retain faculty who are being recruited elsewhere, develop emerging academic leaders, and enable outstanding teaching and research across the college at a time when that support is more critical than ever.”

“Flexibility is key,” said Bennett. “The world today is very different in ways that I never would have expected even 15 years ago.”

“You want a legacy to be able to adapt to what is needed at the time,” added Swanson.

As they look ahead to a future where higher education will continue to change, the couple feels strongly that today's students should have access to the same kind of transformative Iowa experience they were able to have.

“The students deserve the very best faculty we can attract,” Swanson said.

By investing in academic excellence in CLAS, Shane Swanson and Susan Bennett want to help future generations of students discover opportunities they could never have anticipated when they first arrived on campus.

“Who knows what will be important for the college tomorrow, in 15 or 20 years, and how the fund will need to be used,” Bennett added. “We hope it will be there to support the mission as it exists 50 years from now."

For the foreseeable future though, Swanson will continue to set aside a little practice time at Voxman whenever he’s back in Iowa City.

“It's something tangible,” he said. “Just being in this beautiful building, the fact that we had some small part to play in it, I think that's what's cool about structured giving. You can make a gift that is meaningful to you.”