I LOVE academia. I love everything about it: I loved taking classes, teaching, research and publication, and academic conferences. There's a bad side to academia, of course. I had to leave academia in 1991 because I couldn't attract a job offer in a tight market. What really bothered me was the fact I turned down an offer from Bowling Green State, mostly because I also wanted to teach graduate school classes and work with PhD students. The gentleman who eventually got the position offered to me ended up winning early tenure there while I faced disappointments which go beyond what any young academic should face. I choose to focus on the positive.
I want to pay tribute for the gifts of some wonderful people whom have blessed me with their example and their support and whom have inspired me (and whom are not responsible for my character, failures in life or my polemical political views).
Sister Mary Christine Morkovsky
Everyone should have someone like Sister Mary Christine Morkovsky in their college career. I had been lead altar boy at Laredo Air Force Base, seriously considering a career in education, perhaps with the Jesuit order. (Our Lady of the Lake has had an excellent education program.) I served early daily mass, and before I left for college, our pastor gave me his multi-volume set of St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica. Aquinas, who based his philosophy on the writings of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, had a distinct style of expertly summarizing the adversary's arguments and then systematically demolishing them. I took some pride in being able to anticipate his arguments on a number of instances.
I was determined to take philosophy my second semester at OLLU. Sister Marilyn Molloy, my math professor and advisor, was equally convinced I should take a course on the history of art. We had come to an impasse, and I was so angry that I simply walked out on her. When I went back to her later to apologize, she laughed it off, admitting she was so impassioned in her point of view I was probably gone for 10 minutes before she realized I wasn't there.
There were only spots left with Sister Mary Christine's philosophy classes. Other students quickly attempted to dissuade me, pointing out that she didn't give A's. That didn't bother me; as a former valedictorian, I was aware of the importance of grades, but I always felt that if I met my own standards, the grades would take care of themselves. Sister Mary Christine opened up the philosophy of being (metaphysics) to me, and I've never been the same. It was like something I've been hungry for all my life but never realized it.
Sister Mary Christine was rigorous and challenging. For example, on the Friday before the upcoming exam, she might hand out a list of 20 essay questions and say, "You'll have 3 or 4 of these on your exam Monday." And she would grade one's responses on a 4-point scale. I remember on one occasion I had noticed another person got a higher mark than I did on a question, when my response was qualitatively superior. So I complained to Sister Mary Christine that it wasn't fair--I had the better answer. And she AGREED. She told me (I'm paraphrasing), "Ronald, I'm not grading you against other people. You are a very capable person, and I'm grading you on how well you measure up against your own potential. You were capable of doing even better work, and I expect that from you."
To any young scholar, that is the greatest gift you can receive: to be taken seriously, to know what you do and say are important and worthy of respect, to support you in your own quest to better yourself and to reinforce making the most of God's gifts to you. She always challenged me, mildly rebuking me once for occasionally relying on secondary sources instead of primary ones, and I never made that mistake again. To quote my favorite line from one of my favorite films, "As Good As It Gets," Jack Nicholson's character says, "You make me want to be a better man." It would have been very easy for her to simply slap an A on a paper and scrawl "Well done!" That wasn't her style; it was like she dissected my work word for word.
There were other things she did that touched me. For example, I was pursuing my Master's in math at the University of Texas (I had been told by others that pursuing a doctorate in philosophy, my dream, was a bad career move: your best hope for a job is someone giving up a tenured position, e.g., retirement or death.) Sister Mary Christine happened to visit the campus one day and decided to look me up. We met for a few minutes, and she joked that she wasn't sure she would recognize me, thinking maybe I had grown some facial hair. (Sister Mary Christine did scholarly research on French philosopher Henri Bergson, and I suspected perhaps she was there to listen to Charles Hartshorne. I attended a few of his class sessions while I was at UT.) The fact that Sister Mary Christine took the time to look me up and talk to me personally while she was there is one of the highest compliments I think I've ever gotten. I've never forgotten it. I mean, for instance, my baby sister and her family (from Missouri) stayed at a local hotel maybe 5 miles away from me on their family vacation, and I never knew they were in the area.
I ran across an absorbing very humble autobiological piece she wrote for a feminist volume via Google; I don't think she really appreciates how truly wonderful and gifted she is. She left the security of her tenured position at OLL some time after I graduated. Let's just say there's a seminary director out there whom doesn't want to cross paths with me. She has been a true role model, mentor and a leader, and I can't think of a better person, male or female, to head a program or university. (But if there were empty seats in my classes, that had more to do with me than with Sister Morkovsky's standards.) And, unlike me, she has a very nice personality and a beautiful smile. There's a lot to be said for quiet dignity. There were also unexpected lessons in life I took away from her classes. One of the students in one of our classes died in an auto accident. (Sam, you are missed. I bless your memory.)
While I was a professor, I adapted some of Sister Mary Christine's methods. I had a habit of giving a very balanced review, honoring what I liked about the student's assignment and suggestions to improve it. In one of my last classes, students retrieved their papers, and mostly just glanced at the letter grade. This one guy stopped to read my comments. Then he turned me in amazement and said, "You really read this." I nodded. He continued: "I mean, you REALLY read this. You took the time to read this yourself. You understood exactly what I was saying." It's difficult to put into words. It was as if all the hard work and effort he put into this paper were rewarded by a teacher treating his ideas with the dignity and respect they deserved instead of simply handing it off to be graded by some teaching assistant. He felt he was being listened to, that his effort was vindicated, that what he did and said mattered. But, you know, it was a two-way blessing. The fact that he respected the time I had put into analyzing his own work, that what I had to say was important to him--maybe few ever really recognized the efforts I put into my teaching, but at least one person got it.
I suspect if Sister Mary Christine was reading this, she might smile and say, "Well, if he's no longer a logical positivist, there may be hope for him yet..." [It's an inside joke.]
Side Comments about My Teaching Experience
I honor and respect my profession in academia. I remember one theme coming across from faculty interviewers jealous of my publication record in academic job interviews and as a visiting professor at Illinois State, a school that prided itself in being a teaching vs. research-oriented university: "We believe in putting our students first. We don't short-shrift our efforts in the classroom to do research." These self-righteous defensive faculty anger me. The reason I had a good publication record was not at the expense of my teaching but because I was working long hours 7 days a week with no social life. I myself put an enormous amount of time into my own activities in the classroom; I never went to a class without detailed lecture notes, I changed textbooks in courses I taught, and I had tougher standards than more popular MIS lecturers or professors in terms of the nature and number of computing assignments. In some cases, I had graduating MIS majors whom had never written a computer program from scratch (their professors had handed out assignments that served as little more than typing exercises), and I said the buck stops here.
For example, at UTEP, each student was supposed to have a data structures course as a prerequisite to the database management course. The MIS lecturer before me had used the data structures course to teach some relational database concepts and used the database management course as an internship of sorts using his contacts in the El Paso area. I had 90% of the students in my class whom did not have a clue what a linked list was, and I suddenly had to transform the course to explicitly cover prerequisite material. Many of the students felt they were getting overburdened, others had false expectations that I, as a new junior professor, had local contacts for internships or job leads.
As for Diana Natalicio (the UTEP President): there are few people in academia whom hold greater contempt for her than I do. What she did to me was morally unconscionable. This university used my resume to help them win AACSB accreditation (I don't think it was a deciding factor, but my department chair made sure my resume was in the file before it closed), but what happened afterwards was morally and legally reprehensible. I will simply give one example, from a morally bankrupt Dean of Student Affairs office: I got a personal phone call from the Dean threatening disciplinary action against me if I carried out an unspecified threat. I had no clue what this rant was about. I asked him what he was talking about, and he thundered back, "Don't play games with me. You know exactly what I mean." Eventually, with persistence, I got him to say that I had been accused by a student of threatening to blacklist her on the job market. Only one problem: IT NEVER HAPPENED. This is the sort of smear, libel and lack of due process which pervades many colleges and universities under the guise of "student rights". I was a first-semester junior professor; I had no meaningful industry contacts, and I had had no discussions with any student regarding their future job plans.
What eventually surfaced was that I had busted a pair of students for violating the academic honesty provision in my syllabus (not only did I have compelling physical evidence, but when I reminded students of my policy in class and said I had caught some unspecified students, the female in question raised up her hand and asked, in front of everyone, if she was one of the students in question; I don't think Perry Mason ever got an unsolicited, unexpected public confession like that). The female student later went to the Dean of Students office to voice her complaints (by the way, there never was any meaningful due process from a faculty member's perspective). It turned out before I caught her cheating, the young woman had decided to use me as a job reference without my knowledge or consent. I have no clue why someone whom was taking her first course from me and no relationship beyond that would list me as a job reference. But she decided to take a preemptive strike of character assassination against me, fearful of what I would say if one of those employers contacted me. Weeks after the Dean's threat, I did get a postcard from Eastman Kodak asking me for feedback. I called the Dean of Students and informed them of the contact. I wrote back to Eastman Kodak, confirming she was a student in one of my classes, but I had nothing further to say.
Back to OLLU
Before leaving the topic of OLLU, I have to remember fellow philosophy professor Father James Lonergan. (He has a famous relative in the field of philosophy.) I would sometimes go to his office, and he might be smoking a pipe while his favorite composer Bernstein played over the speakers. I don't smoke, but I remember thinking, "This is so cool." One of the things I picked up from Rev. Lonergan was to moderate my stridency; for example, he once chided me over my criticisms of Donceel's neo-Aristotelian view of ensoulment, saying "Don't make Donceel look like an idiot!" But mostly Dr. Lonergan would be disappointed over my political views on unions; he thought that it was immoral for other people to piggyback off the higher standard of living courtesy of union efforts, without sharing in the unions' costs.
The University of Houston
Where do I start? Bruce E. Breeding. One of my office mates. One of the nicest, finest, smartest men I've ever met in my life. He doesn't drink, but he's nonjudgmental over other people making that choice. He held something like 4 or 5 certifications (including a CPA). He's a soft-spoken, even-tempered, and often quiet, but very active in Scouts and when his father passed on, he wrote and shared a remarkable tribute to him. Bruce invited this bachelor to his home for dinner with his beautiful wife Susan and their very bright, talented kids. Bruce introduced me to racquetball, and sometimes I got as high as 3 points. [I was unhappy when he cancelled our racquetball games, because his students often went into overtime on his office hours, e.g., the day before an exam or an assignment was due.] Bruce was a professor at Murray State but eventually left academia. I have to laugh because Bruce once called my personality "an acquired taste". Bruce specializes in non-profits; I don't know if he's available right now, but you will never find a better, more honest, more diligent man. I feel bad because he's done so much for me, but I haven't done as much for him--when his dad was gone, when Susan has been treated as a cancer patient. I wanted so much to do research with him, but my academic career was beginning to fail.
Rick Will. Another fellow PhD student at the time; he was my eyes into the world of expert systems and artificial intelligence. He went the extra mile, helping me get questionnaires filled out from his place of work. We were hoping to do some joint research when my academic career started floundering. I know he was struggling with multiple demands on his time (including his family life). Rick is, at last mention, on the faculty of the University of South Florida.
Minnie Yen. My only co-author. She is also a CPA and shared an office with Bruce and me, and her husband and she, from Taiwan, always had an interest in moving to Alaska. One of my areas of my research in documentation dealt with John Carroll's concept of a minimal manual. I wrote one for learning SQL (her thesis area and subsequent papers with query languages). I asked her for the privilege of writing in support of her tenure. She is or has been the chair of her department at the University of Alaska at Anchorage.
Faculty? Everyone loves my dissertation chairman, Dr. Richard W. Scamell. He once told me if he hadn't been a professor, he would have become a minister. I once offered to put his name on my articles, and he refused, noting it was my work. He was more of an editor/cheerleader. He has this wonderful enthusiasm, and God knows I tried his patience at times. One of my other committee members had a connection, and I managed to get an appointment with his contact to discuss distributing some of my questionnaires there. The bottom line is the manager made it clear to employees he didn't care what they did, and I got a trivial response rate (like 1 out of over 20), even though I paid for postage out of my own money. I don't recall my reaction (probably sarcastic thanks), but the committee member got wind of it and quit. So I had to go mend fences. Dr. Scamell was tolerant of my idiosyncracies. I also first got exposed to Oracle database software in his classes when documentation came in three-ring binders and SQL*Plus was called "ufi" (user-friendly interface).
One of the things I learned from Richard (not necessarily mastering it) was the importance of the "people skills" component in teaching. Scamell was not afraid of admitting he didn't know the answer to a certain question; if anything, it endeared him to students, like "we are all in this learning experience together". Scamell was not a brilliant, spellbinding orator in the classroom; he's not that well-known outside the University of Houston, but he has the uncanny ability to get across the point he cares about your learning experience, he's in it with you, and he wants you to succeed.
In contrast, one of my paranoid students wrote in a teaching evaluation that he thought I had made the course harder than it should be in an effort to drive students out of the class, so I would have fewer papers to grade. (He missed the point if I wanted fewer papers to grade, I could have given fewer exams and assignments.) A lot of students thought it was unfair: they could pull an A in a history class with modest effort, but they were spending up to 20 hours per week working on computing assignments, and they were worried about passing. I actually had one male student crying because one of the people in the class took a half hour to do my assignment and he still hadn't finished in 12 hours.
Michael S. Parks
I never had a class with Parks, and he was not on my committee at UH. (That had more to do with the nature of the research I was doing.) But if I was going to be marooned for 6 hours with no one else to talk to, I would choose Parks. Parks is COOL and arguably the smartest guy I've ever met. He is a mentor and a friend. His boyish enthusiasm for technology reminds me of what academia is all about. I could listen to him for hours as he discusses with relish Turing machines, going to England and hand-copying some of Turing's papers, etc. He used to teach COBOL in auditoriums, and it boggled my mind how it was even possible to teach several dozen students, majoring in other disciplines like finance and marketing, how to write COBOL programs. He even conducted a student production of COBOL theater. I wish I could inspire students like Parks inspired me.
Some Honorable Mentions
Dr. Andrew (Skip) Szilagyi, my research methodology professor at UH, is one of the outstanding faculty members in the organizational behavior department. Anyone reading my own research knows I'm an interdisciplinary researcher at heart. One of my very favorite (but odd) things to do is to shelf-read university bookstore shelves in other disciplines and see what materials they require in their own research courses. I wrote one of the first (if not the first) MIS articles using confirmatory factor analysis. Skip's class was like a candystore for people like me whom love research. Skip also was the kind of person whom encouraged people and would come up and give you a pat on the back.
Dr. John Ricketts served on my dissertation committee and came from the acclaimed Milt Jenkins' MIS program at Indiana University; he is probably the best professor and researcher out of an accredited MIS program I've ever met. He left UH (and, to my knowledge, academics) within a few years of my departure (my guess is the "publish or perish" phenomenon: he was trying to hit elite journals); an IU alumni list implies he's with a management consulting company, KPMG. I once did an invited guest lecture in his graduate DSS class on APL, and he treated me with the same dignity and respect as some mid-level manager from a Fortune 500 company. It's a sad reflection on academics that people like Ricketts, Breeding and myself are no longer there; it's the equivalent of a group of major league baseball all-stars retiring in the prime of their career.
Dr. Jane M. Carey from Arizona State-West Campus has been a driving force behind human factors research in MIS, coordinating symposia (pulling in such reputable researchers as Ben Shneiderman) and editing various related volumes, three of which include book chapters from me. There was no human factors course in my program at UH, so I had researched the field on my own. Somehow I ran across a posting of Jane's posting, and the rest is history. I am so inspired by the fact that she took on the hard work of organizing our area of interest. Jane has this infectious positive attitude and smile. One day a group of us were at dinner, and I spotted some rhubarb pie on the menu. I remembered Mom making rhubarb pie years before, but I hadn't any for a while. So I ordered a slice, Jane mentioned that sounded good to her, too, and one or two others joined in. It was charming; I never before thought of rhubarb pie as a bonding experience. After Natalicio's decision at UTEP, I was caught flatfooted, because most of the schools recruiting faculty members did their qualifying interviews at academic conventions in November and December. Jane Carey knew of a visiting professorship at Illinois State that had opened up because one of the senior faculty was taking a year off to bootstrap a new research program facility. And it turned out the Applied Computer Science Department had a graduate core course in human factors in information systems, which was like a dream come true. There was a lot of negative stuff with my ISU experience beyond the scope of this post, but I don't hold Jane responsible for that.
Dr. Stephen Hawk was a fellow 1985 doctoral consortium attendee. We kept in touch as I started out at UWM. He got his start at the Illinois Institute of Technology. During one of our subsequent conversations, he mentioned running across one of the faculty members in their scientific/technical communication program and asked him if he had ever heard my name. The guy reportedly told him that yes, he knew me: I had written some of the classic articles in the field. When I heard that, it really brightened my day.
In fact, I had had been informally approached by the University of Washington's program, even before the faculty opening was listed, inviting my application. I don't think many people understand the profundity of that; I had never taken a class in the discipline; I had no connections. They approached me solely on the basis of my own work. I've never heard of this type thing happening to someone else, but it's a compliment of the highest order. It had been a dream of mine to serve on the faculty of a land grant university or a well-known private college. In the end, I turned it down because I was an MIS professor. "A prophet is without honor in his own country." During my hellish experiences at UWM, UTEP and ISU, I would often second-guess the decisions I made in reference to BGSU and the University of Washington.
Dr. Barbara Borowiecki (UWM). When I found a foreign student had engaged in serial, deliberate, and unrepentent plagiarism under 3 different professors, including myself, in consecutive semesters with absolutely compelling evidence, I found myself personally attacked by senior faculty and the School of Business Administration for "sabotaging their foreign student recruitment" efforts and "violating the student's right to privacy". (In one case, the student never bothered picking up his paper at the end the semester, and in the other case, the professor approached me about a student paper he regarded as sounding "too professional". The first case the student used passages from texts I had required in my course; the second case involved a classic article in group DSS from Gerry DeSanctis which I instantly recognized.) The two other professors refused to press plagiarism charges against the student, fearing reprisals from senior faculty. Dr. Borowiecki decided to take the investigation outside the School of Business. I do not know the specifics of what happened, but I'm convinced she seriously considered the evidence and foreign students are subject to the same academic policies.
Dr. Annie Brown of Grambling State University had sponsored my campus visit in the spring of 1994. What I thought was particularly interesting about the campus visit is they explicitly included a period where students would interview the candidates and had explicit input into the hiring decision. The student quizzed me on a number of issues, most notably regarding my industry contacts for jobs. How could I explain to them that I had so few contacts, I had been underemployed during the last 3 years? Professional recruiters refused to deal with me because they thought I was a flight risk once the academic job market improved. I was on the "publish or perish" track with no outside compensation during my 8 years in academia. From the standpoint of recruiters, I was unemployed over those 8 years, and whatever professional skills I had before then were probably so obsolete or degraded as to be unusable. I was available during the period I visited Grambling. But then there was no word for a number of weeks; I don't know if they were inviting other candidates, if they were having funding problems, etc. I think I made one or 2 interim status checks but no response. In the interim, Market Knowledge (now a division of Equifax) took an interest in my short-term contractor DBA experience and made an offer. A few weeks later Grambling resurfaced with an offer. In fact, it was considerably more than the bargain basement offer MKI had made. But I felt that MKI had made an offer in good faith, and I didn't think it was ethical to quit because of a belated offer. Afterwards, Dr. Brown wrote me a wrenching letter, thinking she had done something wrong to alienate me. In fact, I wanted to accept BECAUSE OF Annie Brown, someone for whom I hold the highest respect. If the university had made a contingent offer before MKI contacted me, I would have accepted it. It was a matter of timing.
ISU University Administration, Faculty Investigatory Subcommittee. The Applied Computer Science department chairman in the spring semester of 1991 paid an unexpected visit to my office and directly warned me if I lodged a complaint over certain circumstances that had occurred during the fall semester, he would immediately strip me of my classroom responsibilities. [The ironic thing was, despite what had transpired, I was focusing on obtaining a fresh start in a new tenure-track position and leaving the past behind me. I had never suggested to anyone any intent of lodging a complaint; my only explanation was that the chairman was making a preemptive move.] This was a blatant breach of professional ethics and an abuse of power. I immediately went to the university administration. The university administration had to tread a fine line between a faculty member's rights and the legitimate exercise of authority by its departmental heads; they made it clear that any adverse decision made by the department chair against me would need to be documented and subject to university review. The department chairman immediately cried foul, arguing they were unacceptably micromanaging his legitimate exercise of authority and had given me a blank check to do whatever I wanted.
[On a side note, the faculty investigation subcommittee, in the only finding I disagreed with, found that I had not proven my case of the chairman's verbal threat, noting that the chairman denied it happened. Well, let's think about this; when the university told him he would have to document the case for any adverse decision, he squealed like a stuck pig; if he hadn't made the threat, why would the university looking over his shoulder bother him? Who did they think I was, Richard Nixon, taping whatever transpired in my office? And no doubt if I had, they might have argued that I would have violated his rights by taping without his knowledge and consent. The chairman had never visited me in my office before. Why would I have gone to the university administration when I did, several weeks after the referenced incident?]
However, the faculty investigatory subcommittee did find, unanimously, that the department chairman had violated my academic freedom during the fall of 1990. [That is the last I've heard. If the university acted on it or quashed it, I don't know.] The investigatory findings don't make me whole, and to be honest, I had no interest in working in the future with people whom would treat a guest professor so dishonorably. When I launched the academic freedom complaint, I really wasn't sure, from a political standpoint, it was viable: what chance did a junior visiting professor, no longer on campus, have against a powerful department chairman and the senior faculty "good old boy" network? After all, they would have to live with the department chairman on an ongoing basis after the case was decided, and I was no longer there. What the findings show, though, is that the university does not accept violations to academic freedom and does not abide by a double standard between regular and visiting faculty. This decision came too late to help me, but maybe it helped future junior, visiting and other politically vulnerable faculty against abusive, arbitrary exercise of power and authority.
Students
There are a few students whom have been a point of light in the past. The names are unimportant, but they are not forgotten.
- UH Department Chair Rant. Earl Steinberg had called me in to read me the riot act over some nonsense. What I do remember is at the end of his rant, he said, "And don't think for a minute I've been fooled by your having these students coming into my office to defend you." What Earl didn't realize is that I didn't have a clue what he was talking about. What? Some students on their own came in to see him, defending me? There was no conspiracy. To those white knights, I want to express my thanks for their spontaneous act in my defense, even if the chairman was too paranoid to accept what they had to say.
- An Encounter in Houston Shopping. I was clothes shopping in a Montgomery Wards one day, when a young salesman recognized me and approached me. "Do you remember me?" he asked; I wasn't sure, and he provided enough context I realized he was in the first class I taught at UH. All teachers probably know what I was going through, wishing you could do over this thing or that thing, feeling badly they were the students exposed to your initial attempts to teach, knowing that you've improved since then. He cut me off and said, "You know, I was just talking about you at lunch the other day. I learned more in your class than I learned in any other class I had at UH. I never had a real college test until I took your class. I wouldn't change a thing..." He laughed a bit and said, "You know, when I was taking your class, I hated your guts. But it was the best class I ever took."
- A Student's Unsolicited Compliment. During the last COBOL section I taught at UH, I had a middle-aged woman of color in the class. One afternoon I went out checking my students working on their programs. The lady was working on a control break program, but she was staring at her output and didn't know why she wasn't getting the output she expected. I looked at her listing and instantly knew the problem: There was nothing wrong with her program logic, but what she was printing was padded blanks in the field. All she needed to make was a simple adjustment to the field display to print non-blank contents. That is, she had solved the problem; she just needed to adjust the window dressing. Her countenance brightened, and she looked at me smiling and softly said, "You're a great teacher!" God bless her for saying that; I think it's the greatest compliment anyone has ever given me.
- Sometimes you influence a student's life. At times I despaired whether anything I said in class registered on my students. But students often surprised me. I insisted that the students in my undergraduate DSS class present their projects in a professional manner (suit and tie, etc.) So this clean-shaven, impeccably-dressed young man shows up in class and starts talking to me. Confused, I said, "Do I know you?" At this, the whole class starts cracking up. He was one of the students whom normally showed up to classes unshaven, in jeans, and didn't talk much. He thought I was putting him on, but I really didn't recognize him. On another occasion, I sometimes ventured forth my opinion that MIS majors look to opportunities with system integrators and consulting companies (e.g., Accenture, CSC, Deloitte, EDS, Perot Systems, etc.) because of the extensive training programs, large-scale projects across industries, etc. The University of Houston has an IT research center, and I regularly attended sessions along with corporate sponsors and others. One day after the presentation had ended, a young gentleman made a beeline towards me, introduced himself and asked me if I remembered him. He proudly noted he was with Andersen Consulting and said that when it came down to looking for a job after graduation, he remembered what I had told him and the other students, and it made a difference. There were a couple of things I took away from that. First, there were a lot of important professionals and professors in that room--but the person he sought out was me. I was the person he wanted to impress, whose opinion really mattered to him. Second, he not only had listened to what I had to say, but he had made a life-changing decision, his first professional job, based on it. I never realized I had that kind of influence on my students. It was both a powerful validation of what I was doing, but also a sobering responsibility. Words matter. [From the get-go, I have never ridiculed a student in front of his or her peers; if I had something critical to say, it was always in private. If a student asked the same question I answered 5 minutes earlier, I simply repeated the answer.]
- A Student's Unintended Compliment. One angry UWM student lashed out at me in his written teacher evaluation (paraphrased): "I've learned more in this class than any other class I've had. But I want you to know that Dr. Guillemette had nothing to do with it. I had to do it all on my own." Oh, cry me a river! Part of what college is all about is attaining a certain degree of intellectual maturity, preparing a student to be able to think and cope on one's own. For example, in the IT field, you often deal with fuzzy specifications and incomplete or inaccurate information. Nobody is there to remind you information technology is changing, and you're unlikely to be doing the same job 5 years from now, so you need to be constantly retraining. But getting back to the student's critique, I can't get past the first statement: If he learned more in my class, isn't that the point? I'm sure that football players don't feel greater enduring multiple workouts per day getting ready for the season opener and joggers have to train hard getting ready to run the marathon, but students think mastering new skills, like computer programming, doesn't require effort?
- Frank's Phone Call. A Wisconsin Bell tech manager with two senior faculty contacts was admitted to the MIS PhD program. He called me just before I left the university, saying he had heard such good things about my graduate systems analysis course, he had been looking forward to attending it, and he was sorry about seeing me go. I wasn't even aware there was any buzz going around about my systems analysis course, and the phone call was a classy, wonderful point of light in the last moments of my UWM experience. Frank probably never realized that I had attempted to modify MIS PhD program requirements to include IT field experience as a relevant factor. One of those senior faculty members, who happened to chair the PhD program committee, quashed the idea.
- A UTEP Student's Photo of Me. One of the students in the class featuring the self-confessing female student academic honesty incident described above was apparently summoned to the Dean of Student office as a trusted "witness"; the student disingenuously attempted to convince the Dean that I had orally contradicted what I wrote in the course syllabus. The student came to my office and told me what was going on. He said that he refused to go along with the woman's lies, and that even the Dean started arguing with him, because his contradiction of her lies did not fit the Dean's sham proceedings which explicitly excluded my input and due process. [When I said I appreciated what he had tried to do for me, he cut me off. "I didn't do it for you--I did it because of the truth."] He said that the young woman responded to his "betrayal" by sabotaging him in other classes; for example, they were on the same project team in another class, and she had locked him out of the project so he couldn't do his project work. I told him I had no leverage with the other professor but encouraged him to approach the professor himself. In any event, it turns out the student was accepted into the University of Virginia MBA program. He asked me if he could take my picture; he said that he liked to keep a visual history of the people whom made a difference for him. He later gave me a copy of the picture, which I came across during a recent move. This type of request only happened once in my 8 years of teaching. I felt honored to have won the respect of such an outstanding young man.
- A UTEP Student's Graduation Invitation. It's always dangerous to make generalizations, but one thing I have noticed in my teaching experience is that foreign students, especially from Asia and South America, treated me with a heightened degree of respect. A UH organizational behavior professor, Art Jago, once mentioned he was treated like a king when he visited Europe. I also remember a fellow worker from Bangladesh when I worked as a NASA contractor at Clear Lake City (i.e., Houston) several years ago. He told me he had stopped his education with a Master's degree and was considered to be the black sheep of the family because he was the only one without a PhD or MD. American students, on the other hand, have said or done shockingly disrespectful things, which I would never have considered saying or doing in pursuing my college education. I'm just going to give a minor example. There was a rumor going around at UWM that a female professor was encouraging students to address faculty by their first names, that anyone objecting was a stuck-up snob. The only reason I mention that here is that one of my male students one day and started addressing me, "Ron, ...." I stopped him there: "Dr. Guillemette". He ignored me and restarted, "Ron,..." "Dr. Guillemette." "Ron,..." "Dr. Guillemette". We went a couple more rounds before he finally said, with audible disdain, "Dr. Guillemette" It just annoyed me that he deliberately ignored how I wanted to be addressed: I wasn't in the business of being his buddy; I was his professor. I never seemed to run into these type problems with foreign students. Anyway, a Mexican student visited me just before graduation and personally handed me an invitation to his graduation and graduation celebration to meet his family. This again was a one-time experience in my years of teaching. Unfortunately, I could not attend because my baby sister's college graduation was the same weekend, and I already had airline reservations. But I was so touched that he considered me important enough in his educational experience to introduce me to his family.
- An ISU Software Design Student's Comments. The ISU Applied Computer Science department faculty prided itself on being teaching-oriented with ties to practitioners and the like. I brought in a number of then relatively new concepts to supplement obsolete technical textbooks, such as object-oriented design. One of my senior students in the class mentioned to me after a lecture, "You know, I've been taking courses here for 4 years. And this is the first and only class I heard any faculty member talking about things that are being discussed in technical publications, like object-oriented design." Is there really any wonder that people who conduct original research would bring the same intellectual curiosity and drive to their lectures and teaching?
- An ISU Graduate Student's Post-Semester Letter. One of my female Asian students in my graduate human factors in IS course wrote a full-page double-spaced letter which seemed to both acknowledge the hard work and coverage of topics in the course and to caution me it was a bit much for some students in the course. She also attached a xerox copy of a technology ad which plays tribute to and encourages the innovative, lonely leader.
I think when I started my academic career, I had this Leibnizian notion of conflict resolution: "Let us calculate." As Newton observed, "If I have seen further than the others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."
I never had political ambitions--to become a departmental chairman, a dean, a university president, etc. But I found myself, curiously enough for a conservative, to be an agent for change. At UWM, I found that we were graduating undergraduate MIS majors with only 9 semester hours in MIS; in contrast, the MIS majors at Whitewater required 21 hours with valuable exposure to IBM mainframes. But when the MIS faculty moved to tighten the program (double the number of MIS courses), existing students wanted a grandfather clause. I faced a political fight from the business school administration for adopting a textbook including a COBOL-85 compiler; they were pressuring me to use the Microsoft COBOL compiler (which had no short-term plans to upgrade to the 1985 standard). My first semester at UWM I was explicitly threatened by a senior MIS faculty member (using a potential tenure vote as leverage) because I critized his student's dissertation proposal (during the frozen period) for failing to describe operational measures, statistical power, and other critical elements. I saw a CPA whom decided to apply to the MIS PhD program, failed his first exam, ignored faculty member warnings to wait a semester before retaking his final attempt, and failed a second time--only to see the 4 senior faculty quarrel amongst themselves (one of the faculty members said that he and the student had already agreed on a dissertation topic and dared the other senior faculty to tell the student he failed) and then agree to have the PhD program chair (one of the professors) convene a meeting, introduce a conditional pass initiative with remedial work), reconvene the exam and vote a conditional pass (over my explicit opposition), a blatantly unethical act, because the policy was not in force at the time of the exam).
I saw other ethically dubious situations as well. For example, when I was a member of the MBA admissions committee, we had a female minority candidate whom come in significantly below both GMAT and major GPA cutoffs, our principal objective criteria. The committee chair, a stooge for the business school dean, noted the dean's support of her application, saying the dean had already awarded her a fellowship and it would be a political embarrassment to the dean for the student not to be admitted; the two female junior faculty silently joined him in a deadlock decision. The committee chair then noted that I would be leaving the committee at the end of the month, the dean would ensure a crony faculty member would replace me, and the student would be admitted then. That was a grossly unethical abuse of power and an unconscionable double standard; I changed my vote to present/abstain, which allowed the admission to carry without the moral authority of a committee majority vote. I found myself subsequently attacked by both sides.
There are many other issues that I won't discuss in this post. Life is unfair, and we must move on. But I did not seek out controversy. Perhaps I violated the unwritten rule that a junior, untenured professor is to be seen and not heard. At the same time, one faces the need to make a moral stand. I've seen teachers teach what they want and failing to cover knowledge and skills needed to succeed in higher-level courses or as a college graduate. So what if a UTEP MIS graduate couldn't write computer programs or a UWM MIS graduate can't find a job? Faculty are evaluated on simple evaluation scales. Professors find all sorts of gimmicks to attract high ratings. For example, in the graduate cost accounting course I took, the professor announced just before the forms were distributed, that regardless of prior work in the course, if students scored 95% on the final, they got an A. Well, all the students thinking they were doomed to a grade of B or C were ecstatic, and no doubt what the professor just offered had an effect on his ratings.
In the colleges I taught at, a course was basically an item on a punchcard, and there was no intrinsic motivation to go beyond the minimum effort necessary to get the item punched. In one case I remember, I required 4 computing assignments in the class, and the lecturer in the competing section required no computer work. What I've found is that students don't stop to think maybe the lecturer in the other section is cutting corners at their expense and they'll pay the piper down the road; rather, it's more, why are we being singled out and punished by some sadistic professor?
The old saw is, just quietly play the game by its current rules, and maybe someday, after you've paid your dues, you'll be in a position to do the right thing. Personally I'm convinced all that changes is the scenario, and you find yourself subject to a new set of rules.
What I've attempted to do in this post is to point out some of those individuals whom have made a difference to me in my academic career and the occasional point of light which brightened dark nights along the way. Maybe one day I'll find myself back in academia. What I know is I worked my heart out as a professor. I worked to support the ideals of my profession, and I always did what I truly believed was in the best interests of my students. I suspect that I've had an impact on more than just a handful of students, but I'm grateful to those along the way to acknowledge the difference I've made for them. Maybe I'm little more than a carrier of the torch from wonderful teachers and mentors like Sister Mary Christine Morkovsky to others with better political skills, the same ideals and the commitment to make a difference. If so, it was well worth the struggle.
