Biography|Robert Shaye — The Ann Arbor Campus That Handed Him a 1960 Business Degree

Company biographies treat Robert Shaye as a filmmaker who happened to hold a law degree.

The first degree was a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Michigan, conferred in 1960. The College of Literature, Science, and the Arts still prints that year when it describes the alumnus who later endowed a professorship in his father's name.

The glass Ross School of Business on Tappan and Hill is not the building he sat in. Ross's current flagship opened decades after he left Ann Arbor. The pin is the business-school campus that now occupies this ground.

While he was a Michigan student he also kept making pictures. The University of Michigan finding aid for the Robert Shaye–New Line Cinema Papers records a short titled Image, released in 1963. A 1976 New York Times profile places the same short in his Columbia Law years, when he was twenty-four, and says the Museum of Modern Art bought it for the film archive.

The safer sentence is the one both sources share: Image exists, it dates to 1963, and MoMA took it.

The business training is the part later profiles skip. His father, Max Mendle Shaye, had been a wholesale grocer in Detroit. Distribution was the family trade before it was a studio strategy.

From this campus he went on to Columbia Law School and a Fulbright year in Sweden, where he studied international copyright law at Uppsala and Stockholm. That legal habit is what later let him notice a lapsed copyright on a 1930s classroom scare film.

The degree year is not folklore. It is on the university's own gift page.

Photo: Dwight Burdette, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons