The glasses hang on a blue nylon cord, just visible between the collar of the light brown suede jacket. Dark trousers, like the shoes resting lightly on the accelerator. The hair and beard have turned white and look like they’ve recently been trimmed.

"Can you feel it?" asks Dean Svend Hylleberg, "it’s fantastic not to be shut in. To hear and smell and look up at the sky. When we drove to Lake Como on holiday last year, it was like this all the way except for the motorway. It was wonderful."

Like this is with the roof down on the small, black convertible Mercedes sports car. Now we’re cruising along the ring road on an unpredictable day in May. We’ve arranged to find a destination that means a lot to him. The occasion for the road trip is that Svend Hylleberg is stopping as Dean of Aarhus BSS (Aarhus University, School of Business and Social Sciences). It will be a road trip with pit stops to talk to some of the people who know him well both professionally and personally.

But this is no retirement interview, as Svend Hylleberg isn’t leaving the university. He will return to research and teaching at the Department of Economics and Business Economics when a new dean takes over the post he has held since 2011.

Moreover, the holiday trip last year to Lake Como was with his family. Svend and Elly Hylleberg, two daughters, son-in-laws and a total of four grandchildren. The same as every year. In the summer, the trip goes to a rented holiday home on the island of Funen. For Svend Hylleberg, family means everything.

It’s so beautiful here!

Shortly after we park on Bartholins Allé in the University Park, Hylleberg points to the tall, yellow building 1350.

"My office was here between 1973 and 2000, at least when I wasn’t in the USA. You can see all the way to Samsø," he says, a man who has been part of Aarhus University for half a century.

With a gesture that includes the surroundings he continues:

"This is how it’s looked here since 1964. It’s so beautiful here. The other day I was at the Department of Mathematics, where I have taught in the lecture halls for many years. There are still many great blackboards and it looks and smells like it did back then."

The Danish National Girls Choir can be heard in the speakers as we sink down into the seats with a view of the yellow-brick buildings and light-green leaves under a partially blue sky.

"I could also have driven to the forest at Frijsenborg which I have at the bottom of my back garden."

Svend Hylleberg lives in Hammel, close to Frijsenborg Forest. As do the rest of his family.

"Every morning I pick up my daughter's dog and run in the forest for an hour between six and seven. The rest of the day Elly looks after the dog. My daughter got it because it’s a hunting dog that’s afraid of gunfire, but since it became part of our family, it thinks it’s arrived in canine heaven."

The most important person

One of the countless students to have enjoyed the view of Frijsenborg Forest from Hylleberg’s garden is Tim Bollerslev, currently a professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and among the international elite in the field of financial econometrics and empirical finance.

"Svend is the person who has meant most to my career," says Bollerslev, who graduated from Aarhus University in 1983 with an MSc in mathematics-economics.

"In my second or third year I was employed as his research assistant while he wrote his higher doctoral dissertation. He was probably the most up-to-date researcher within his field at that time. And definitely the most internationally oriented, which at the time was no where near as common in Denmark as it is today," continues Bollerslev.

With his international connections, Hylleberg managed to bring internationally recognised researchers to Aarhus. Researchers that he had got to know during his stays in the USA, among other things, as visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego.

"Several of the researchers we’re talking about, one’s that Svend got to come to Aarhus back then, have received the Nobel Prize during the last 10-15 years," says Bollerslev.

Among them are the American economist Robert F. Engle, who received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2003. Svend Hylleberg got to know him when he urged Tim Bollerslev to travel to the USA to take a PhD.

"Robert F. Engle was my supervisor at the university in San Diego, so he has, of course, also been an important person for me, but I would never have met him if it hadn’t been for Svend Hylleberg."

A list for the Dean's Office

Having close contact with his students has always been important to Hylleberg, also when he was department head at what was then the Department of Economics and Business, and again as dean of firstly the Faculty of Social Sciences and since Aarhus BSS. Over the years, he has met informally with representatives of the students from all the degree programmes at the faculty each month.

Do the students you meet with report back via the councils they sit in at their various degree programmes?

"Yes, they do. Actually, I made a mistake to begin with, as I didn’t say to them that they could let what I told them trickle down through the system. So some of them actually believed that what they heard was confidential. I know I say what I really think about things occasionally. But since then, they’ve understood that this is the aim of those meetings."

It has almost become a joke in the Dean's Office that they are always particularly busy each time the dean returns from his meetings with the students.

"Because I have a whole list of things that need to be done, which they will have to run about and fix."

Hylleberg’s Square

Hylleberg starts the car, drives along Bartholins Allé and parks next to a large, cordoned off area besides the Departments of Political Science and Psychology. The Danish National Girls Choir are still singing and Hylleberg looks contentedly at the students who are – even on this slightly chilly early summer day – sitting at several of the tables and benches placed around the area.

"Did you know that they named this Hylle Square? The name is both ironic and affectionate."

I nod and he looks even more pleased as he explains that until about six years ago there were just parking spaces here.

"But then I had a meeting with architect Møller at which I asked him whether we could get rid of the cars so we could make a square with tables and benches. He took a sketch straight up of his briefcase!"

And then the senior management team decided to do go ahead?

"No, I did! It cost two million Danish kroner to build it. I was criticised for using the faculty’s money to do it, but everything was actually financed by the rector's funds."

How did you get him to do pay?

"By telling him we were going to need some money!"

Enormous self-confidence

Svend Hylleberg has an enormous but positive self-confidence according to Hans Jørgen Larsen, who has had him as chairman of the board for a total of 21 years while Hans Jørgen Larsen has been director of Jyske Invest.

Over the years, the two men have developed a personal friendship that has also led to them going on joint holidays together with their wives. They’re also part of a group of friends who take an annual excursion to see some of Denmark's history.

"We started out twelve years ago in Jelling with Gorm the Old (the first historically recognised King of Denmark, ed.). Last year we followed in the footsteps of Jeppe Aakjær (Danish poet and novelist, ed.) and visited sites such as Spøttrup Castle in Salling. In these situations my impression is that Svend really appreciates the camaraderie, food and wine – and a good historical narrative," says Hans Jørgen Larsen.

When asked where he got his self-confidence from, Hylleberg says he has had it ever since childhood.

"As a young man I never got into fights when we were at went to country dances in Rødkærsbro village. I probably gave the impression that if anyone tried anything on, they’d end up losing."

Tough

There cannot really be anyone at the university who has got that impression from meeting Svend Hylleberg. But even though he has an enormous work capacity, as noted by Professor Torben M. Andersen from the Department of Economics and Business Economics, he hasn’t used it to train his skills in giraffe language.

And the people who know him well can understand that he sometimes appears to be a little tough to those that only know him superficially. But that is not how they find him to be. As Tim Bollerslev puts it:

"He has his ideas and he says things the way he sees them. But even though I was told as a student that what I said was ‘terrible rubbish’ or that what I’d written was ‘really crap’, I've never felt I was in any way inferior. He always says things with a twinkle in his eye and a smile. I don't quite know how to explain it, but with Svend you can always feel the person behind it all – and the warmth."

Another person who has known Hylleberg privately for many years is Professor Torben M. Andersen. He shares this view:

"You can agree or disagree with Svend, but I believe that most people would say that he is deeply committed to the things he does. But people who don’t know him can perhaps find him to be a little blunt, because he can have a manner that makes you think: Hold on a minute that was straight from the hip! But I’ve known him for many years and don’t find he is like that at all."

Forthright

When Hylleberg previously worked at the former Department of Economics and Business, there was a forthright tone, explains Torben M. Andersen.

"We had no problem taking a discussion over lunch without getting annoyed with each other just because we had different points of view. And Svend likes a good discussion. I also believe there are many examples where he has listened to arguments and taken note of the discussion. Being dean is a different role and taking that role has some consequences, of course. Not least in view of the fact that we have a University Act with a fairly hierarchical governance structure."

Soft-centred with a penchant for a good sermon

Hylleberg doesn’t exactly look uncomprehending when he hears that some people find him to be tough, if they don’t know him well enough. He looks more like he is searching for the right words to describe how wrong he thinks it is. He finds a way to put it into words:

"I might seem tough on a more general level. But I’m soft-centred on a personal level."

We sit for a while without speaking in the parked sports car. The Danish National Girls Choir begin another number from the repertoire of Danish songs, while students glance sidelong at the man behind the wheel on their way to and from the yellow-brick buildings.

What are we actually listening to?

"We’re in the slightly religious department."

Are you religious?

"Not particularly. I’m a member of the Danish national church and I like to hear a good sermon. We go to church maybe five to seven times a year and perhaps to a confirmation.

What makes a good sermon?

"One that makes you think about things. Like a good lecture where you take something away from it. Something to think about."

Translated by Peter Lambourne.