The Windsor Class

Gilbert Gottfried was credited as the original voice of the Aflac duck. But older financial analysts like me know better. It was plainly a recording of Ed Rosenbaum laughing at one of his own jokes.

The laugh was ridiculous. The institution he built around it became the world’s premier CFA study seminar—and remained so for roughly three decades.

I knew the laugh well. Ed had taught me as an undergraduate; I later attended the Windsor Class at all three levels and earned the designation at 24.

Every May, hundreds of worried, overworked investment professionals converged on the University of Windsor. Many travelled across oceans to get there. New York had Wall Street. Boston managed the money. But when it was time to study, they all came to Windsor.

Among generations of analysts, from Sydney to Stuttgart, the seminar became known simply as the Windsor Class.

Its arithmetic presents the first puzzle. A typical seminar brought roughly 600 candidates together with about six faculty—an apparently impossible ratio of around 100:1.

How could one professor help a hundred exhausted adults help one another?

Part of the answer is that the categories were wrong. A professor at the front explained the theory. A candidate at the back, responsible for billions in that particular market, occasionally explained what the theory meant in practice. At Windsor, “student” did not mean beginner.

Nor were the levels sealed off. Rookies studied alongside Level II and Level III candidates; advanced candidates helped people coming behind them. Knowledge travelled down and sideways. So did candid advice: a disinterested, well-informed course correction from someone already doing the work could change a candidate’s preparation—and perhaps a career.

Ambition travelled the other way. Newer candidates saw people with remarkable careers sitting beside them, and returning candidates one or two levels further along the same path. They did not simply learn more. They acquired evidence about who they might become.

Competence was not abstract. It was sitting beside you—older and younger, from every inhabited continent and every corner of finance.

Every May, these giants of finance travelled to Windsor. Some came because they needed help. Others returned because they had help to give. In 1990, one of those alumni volunteers was John Simpson. He had earned his CFA six years earlier and now ran Fidelity Canada.

The seminar also assembled something rarer than expertise: common purpose under real stakes.

Business-school classrooms can reward the student who grandstands or signals that the work is beneath him. Windsor offered little social return for that. These adults had travelled too far and surrendered too much to treat the week casually. The exam for our level loomed heavily over us, all to be written on the same day three weeks hence.

That seriousness changed the room’s social economy. The exam was the adversary, not the person beside you; effort and useful knowledge earned attention. We were all working together not to fail.

The room learned during the week. Ed made the institution learn between years. He did not merely welcome feedback; he demanded it, session by session. The judgments carried consequences: instructors were coached, responsibilities shifted, and the strongest teachers returned. Carl Schweser was among the instructors Ed cultivated; he would carry the work of preparing CFA candidates far beyond Windsor.

Each May, returning candidates encountered a seminar reshaped by what they and their predecessors had told Ed.

Contemporary reporting from the 1990s showed Windsor candidates performing substantially better than the broader candidate population. The results appear to have strengthened Windsor’s reputation, drawing candidates back for the next level while attracting another overwhelmed group of rookies.

Two reinforcing loops had formed. Faculty organized the learning, but candidates helped teach one another. Then candidates evaluated the teaching, helping Ed improve the faculty. Successful candidates became accomplished alumni; some returned as volunteers and placed what they had learned—and what they had since become—back into the room.

About six faculty helped teach 600 candidates. Six hundred candidates helped Ed improve the teaching.

That may explain how the seminar worked. But one detail still nags at me. Canadian mutual funds stood at the beginning of an extraordinary boom in 1990. I could scarcely have imagined a better job in finance than running Fidelity Canada. Yet, for years, John would step away from that job for a week and return to Windsor, simply to help candidates succeed.

What made the Windsor Class worth coming back to?

I have offered one provisional answer: Windsor arranged faculty, candidates, and volunteers around a common purpose. It made effort respectable, moved knowledge across levels, acted on demanding feedback, and left little oxygen for indifference or resistance.

Can other institutions do that deliberately—not by finding unusually virtuous people, but by arranging ordinary roles so that contribution earns status and obstruction finds no audience?

If you attended, taught, or volunteered at the Windsor Class, I would like to know what I have missed. What made it work? What made people return? Which of its arrangements could help adults learn, work, and develop one another elsewhere?

And if people working in one of the world’s most competitive professions could cooperate so effectively in Windsor, what do those of us who benefited owe the communities that helped form us?