After 36 years as chief financial officer and holding various other titles, Wesley Tschetter is retiring from his position as vice president of finance and business at South Dakota State.
He has worked under six different presidents during his tenure and oversaw roughly $175 million worth of investments into SDSU infrastructure; including student residence halls, The Union, the Wellness Center and dining services, according to a press release from SDSU.
“The bottom line is I’ve had just an exciting time,” Tschetter said. “There have been very, very few days I didn’t look forward to going to work.”
Tschetter said the most memorable experience of his career has been building relationships with campus constituents, alumni, the Foundation, officials in Pierre, the Board of Regents and SDSU staff.
Working at SDSU has been a professionally rewarding experience, Tschetter said, due in large part to SDSU’s history of leadership, and an overall “congenial” relationship between staff at all levels.
President Barry Dunn has worked with Tschetter for more than six years, ever since Dunn was dean of agriculture.
What stands out to him most, he said, is Tschetter’s honesty, commitment to the betterment of students and his love of SDSU.
“When I became president he pledged to me that he’d stay for another year to help me out, and he ended up staying for two,” Dunn said. “I think we’ll all miss him a great deal. He’s more than a colleague; he’s a friend, and I think hundreds of people on campus feel that way.”
Tschetter’s will officially be retired in June, and though he is going to do some traveling, he doesn’t plan on completely stopping his work with SDSU finances. He has collected more than 50 years of SDSU financial information and plans on putting it into a searchable manuscript for the Briggs Library archives.
“I’ve been storing finance information for a very long time,” he said, “and I think it ought to be documented.”
The information includes a history of different programs that have come and gone, as well as the bond financing systems.
Since he was hired, Tschetter said his primary goal as both vice president of business and finance, as well as chief financial officer, was for SDSU “to maintain, and operate at, a high level of efficiency and credibility in our business practices.”
“That would be my mission statement,” Tschetter said.
Tschetter is a South Dakota native and graduated from SDSU with a degree in engineering in 1969. He earned his master’s degree in business administration from the University of South Dakota and went on to work in financing for the South Dakota legislature for 11 years. He began working at SDSU in 1982 when he was hired by then-president Sherwood Berg.
