Page 1 2

The hospitality student stutters nervously as she reads from the menu and trembles a bit as she pours our Cabernet.

She asks us repeatedly if we want more bread.

This is finals night in the service class at the International College of Hospitality Administration in Brig, Switzerland. Our server's grades are on the line, and I can see her professor in the corner of the room, watching over our table like a hawk, grimacing and scribbling occasionally on his notepad.

His standards are high: Switzerland is known as the birthplace of hotel management, and many of the world's most famous hotels are run by Swiss managers. A Swiss cook serves up the fare set before the Queen of England.

It was here in this small, picturesque alpine valley near Brig, Switzerland, where famed hotel magnate César Ritz was born and began his career in hotel-restaurant management, eventually working in some of Europe's most prestigious hotels.

Just as rural Pullman, Washington, may be the last place one would imagine to find a world-class hotel and restaurant school, Ritz, the 13th child of a Swiss peasant couple, was an unlikely candidate to become "the king of hoteliers and the hotelier of kings." But in this obscure alpine village where he took his first job as an assistant waiter, Washington State University students are learning the fine art of European hotellerie, and students from around the world are learning American business management methods from WSU, whose onsite faculty offer a bachelor's degree in hospitality business management.

"We think it's a very good mix," said Michael Vieregge, director and assistant professor at the WSU School of Hospitality Business Management's Swiss Center. "It's the best of two worlds coming together."

Lothar Kreck, a WSU hotel and restaurant administration professor who retired in 1997, helped negotiate WSU's cooperation when the unique hospitality administration school in Brig was launched in 1985 by Swiss businessman W.D. Petri. Petri was looking for a way to modernize the Swiss hospitality system's service-oriented education with American business methods. Kreck helped make it possible by convincing WSU to allow students from the Swiss school to finish their degrees in Pullman. Later, WSU began offering credits on-site through the extended degree program that was expanding rapidly under then-WSU president Sam Smith. In 1989, the Institut Hotelier César Ritz became the first Swiss hotel school with an American accreditation.

In fact, when WSU began offering its credits for a bachelor's degree in Switzerland, it was the first U.S. hospitality school to do so in Europe, according to Vieregge. Other schools soon followed suit, including University of Massachusetts, University of Central Florida, and Virginia Tech. Today, Cornell University's hospitality school offers a master's degree in Paris.

But at the time, Petri was rocking the boat. In fact, he was kicked out of the Swiss Hotel Association for introducing English language programs.

"At the time it was seen as very non-traditional," explains director of WSU's School of Hospitality Business Management Terry Umbreit. "But looking back now, it was actually pioneering and cutting edge."

That, despite an ancient alpine culture that at first seems anything but modern. Brig is the German-speaking capital of the State of Valais, gateway to the Matterhorn Mountain as well as elite resorts such as St. Moritz. A railroad town with about half the population of Pullman, it's situated in a wide valley of achingly beautiful Swiss villages flanked by 12,000-foot Alpine peaks.

Housewives hang featherbeds to air out the shuttered bedroom windows of their half-timbered chalets. Enormous woodpiles stacked outside would last for five winters on the Palouse. The cows wear bells. And when spring break rolls around and Pullman students are heading off to Mexico or the warm dunes along the Snake River, these students are still knee deep in snow. (Although, they like to point out, it's just a few hours drive down into Italy so they can hit a Mediterranean beach in less time than it takes Pullman students to drive to Seattle.)

But don't let the alpine location and old-world charm fool you. The current school facility was built in 1991, expanded in 2000, and is fully wired for Internet access and videoconferencing. Each student is given a wireless connection when they arrive that allows them to carry their laptops to class and check their e-mail by satellite wherever they are, even though "where they are" appears cut off from the rest of the world by the surrounding mountains.

Page 1 2

Continued