RIT Accounting Professor Keeps On Giving With Endowed Business Scholarship

The saying “If the shoe fits, wear it,” has added meaning for two individuals—James Salzano and Daniel Tessoni—who established long lasting rapport since their classroom days at Rochester Institute of Technology’s E. Philip Saunders College of Business in the late 1980s.

Salzano was a public accounting major who worked as a co-op at Altiers Shoes until graduating from RIT in 1987, and “Dan Tessoni was my accounting professor and the most influential instructor of my life.”

In lieu of their commitment to “giving back to RIT and the community,” Salzano and Tessoni are co-sponsoring the Daniel D. Tessoni Endowed Accounting Scholarship in the Saunders College of Business. Details of the scholarship are yet to be determined.

According to Salzano, executive vice president of The Clarks Companies, “Dan played a critical factor in my development and he’s right up there with family and friends. We’ve stayed in touch through the years and Dan has followed my career from Price Waterhouse to Altiers, when it finally closed its doors in 1994, to a year at Paychex and finally to Clarks in 1995.”

Honoree Tessoni, who lives in Pittsford, says, “The $25,000 scholarship will help provide students with the economic strength to study at RIT and it’s my best legacy after 34 years of teaching.”

Salzano has spent nearly as many years in the footwear business—29 to be exact. “My father managed all the Altiers stores and with a family of five boys, we often found ourselves working in the stockroom at Midtown on Saturdays,” says Salzano, a native of Irondequoit who now lives with his family in Massachusetts.

At Clarks, Salzano manages operations for the $700 million business across North America. “We sell almost 20 million pairs of shoes, but helping to take care of people is just as valuable as the final numbers on a financial report,” he says. “It’s good business to give back to the community.”

“It’s also an ethical balance—taking responsibility—very much like Dan does in the classroom. If you’re interested, he’s got the time for you, and I hope many more students will have the opportunity to work with Dan.”

After all these years, Tessoni says, “It’s truly humbling for a professor to be viewed this way and to be rewarded with a generous gift from a student whom I’ve always regarded as having the highest level of integrity and standards,” Tessoni says. “The learning is ‘two-way’ now.”

One of eight colleges at RIT, the E. Philip Saunders College of Business is accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International (AACSB International) and enrolls more than 1,200 undergraduate and graduate students. The college recently added an academic major for incoming students in its newly established Center for Consumer Financial Services.