[The Montana Professor 15.2, Spring 2005 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Henry Gonshak
English
Montana Tech-UM
Professor Doug Abbott is a happy man. Not only is he thrilled with his job at Montana Tech as a Professor of Business and Information Technology, but he also enjoys being Chair of his department, as well as Dean of the College of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Information Technology. Doug finds the reasons for his own love of teaching summed up by Henry Adams: "A teacher effects eternity. He can never tell where his influence stops." In the Spring of 2005, Doug was one of the winners of Tech's annual Rose and Anna Busch Achievement Awards, which reward faculty members who have made outstanding contributions in teaching or service to the college.
Professor Abbott was born and raised in Helena, where he attended the local public schools. In 1980, he received a football and academic scholarship to Montana Tech. As an undergraduate, Doug majored in petroleum engineering and started as quarterback on the football team, leading the Orediggers to a conference championship in 1983. Unfortunately, the petroleum industry crashed during Abbott's college years; when he enrolled at Tech oil was $44 a barrel, but when he graduated it had plunged to $8. In a quest for gainful employment, Doug moved to Houston, where he paid the bills working as a doorman and bouncer at a nightclub, and appearing as an extra on the short-lived CBS cop show (a Miami Vice clone) Houston Nights. Returning to Montana, Abbott earned a Masters in Business Administration at UM in 1988.
At the time, Abbott had no interest in becoming a teacher, planning instead to find work as an investment banker. Doug's entry into the profession resulted largely from serendipitous circumstances. Soon after receiving his MBA, he wound up serving as a pallbearer at his grandfather's funeral, where he became reacquainted with Joe Kasperick, then a business professor at Montana Tech. Kasperick told Abbott about an opening in Tech's Business Department. On a lark, Doug applied. He's been teaching at Montana Tech ever since. Thanks in good part to Joe's tutelage, Abbott (as he puts it) "caught the teaching bug." Students often ask Doug why, with a degree in petroleum engineering and an MBA, he doesn't go into industry, where he could make much more money than he does as a college professor. But Abbott finds that educating young minds gives him a quality of life that he doubts the business world could ever duplicate.
In 2004, Abbott completed his Ed.D. at the University of Montana in Educational Leadership, which facilitated his promotion to Full Professor. His dissertation explored the use of artificial intelligence to help college athletics programs determine where high school football players are likely to enroll, and thus budget their recruiting efforts efficiently. The study focused on three variables: athletics, academics, and demographics. Abbott's research concluded that the best recruiting model would incorporate all three variables, rather than focusing exclusively on athletics, as coaching staffs often do. Doug plans in the future to expand his study to encompass college enrollment in general. He hopes to develop a model that can aid the recruiting efforts of the Admissions Program at Montana Tech.
Along with his teaching duties, Abbott works regularly as a business consultant. He's done marketing research for the Department of Commerce. For the Department of Energy, he's performed economic cost-modeling, which determines the costs involved in the use of new environmental remediation technology. Consulting has also led Doug into the field of forensic economics, which calculates the amount of lost wages and benefits owed to individuals involved in litigation. In that capacity, he's often been retained by lawyers and testified at trials. Abbott finds that his teaching and consulting complement one another. In the classroom, he can cite his experiences as a consultant to provide students with "real-world" examples and information, while his academic study of the business field enhances his consulting.
As a teacher, Abbott has been influenced by the educational theories of John Dewey, in particular Dewey's belief (developed most fully in Experience and Education) that students learn best through experience, through active learning, a two-way dialogue between teachers and students, rather than through lectures delivered by a "sage on the stage." To this end, Doug has his charges engage, for example, in an exercise he calls "The Prisoner's Dilemma." Its point is to teach the business concept of "oligopoly"--a marketing situation in which a limited number of producers are all selling the same basic product with slight modifications. Casting the students as prisoners, Abbott divides up the class into pairs, then sends one student from each pair out of the room, while asking the other if he or she wishes to confess to the crime for which the team stands accused. If both confess, they each get five years; if neither confesses, they each get ten years, and if one does and one does not, the confessor gets fifteen years while the other gets off scot-free. In short, the sentence of each prisoner is determined by the actions of his or her partner. In an oligopoly, the same kind of mutual interdependence prevails, with the way sellers produce and market their products influenced by the anticipated activities of their competitors.
What changes has Abbott instituted in his classes over the years? For one thing, he's grown more realistic. When Doug composed his first exam for his first course at Tech, students had one hour to complete a test that included 88 true/false questions, plus essays. Today, the same exam contains 40 questions. In retrospect, Abbott can see that he initially succumbed to an error common to new instructors--trying to teach everything the course can conceivably cover, rather than assessing how much students can realistically be expected to learn.
Abbott's pedagogical approaches also have changed in response to the rise of the Internet. Left to their own devices, many students will do all their research for a given project exclusively in cyberspace. While the Internet comprises a vast storehouse of information, many of its sites are entirely unchecked, uncredentialed, and of dubious value. Therefore, Abbott forces his students to turn as well to more traditional sources of information, such as the Encyclopedia of Associations, which lists contact information for every organization in America.
Due to recent, highly publicized scandals in the business world involving major corporations such as ENRON and Microsoft, Abbott has found himself increasingly turning in his classes to the topic of business ethics (a subject also taught as a separate course by a department colleague). Committed to morality in the workplace, Abbott tells students that if an employer demands that you do something that violates your conscience, it's better to disobey the order, even if the consequence is termination, than to act unethically on the job. Abbott regrets that current corporate scandals have left the public with soured, cynical attitudes toward the business world. However, he doesn't consider the present scandals unprecedented. There's always been business corruption. What is new, to his mind, is that today an omnipresent mass media bombards the public with relentless and often sensationalized coverage of every act of malfeasance.
What's Abbott's take on Montana Tech students? For one, he's impressed by their work ethic. An anecdote illustrates his point. Two of Doug's students, twins, were interviewed at Tech by a petroleum engineering firm. The interviewer explained that, as employees, the twins would work for two full weeks, twelve hours a day, and then get a week off. The students were struck by how easy the job sounded. As ranch kids, used to toiling from dawn till dusk with no time off, those hours seemed a breeze.
For Abbott, the major challenges Montana Tech students face are economic. As tuition continues to rise, Tech students scrambling to pay the bills are forced to work ever-longer hours at part- or even full-time jobs, while holding down full course loads. Moreover, the fastest growing segment of the student population at Tech (and nationally) is non-traditional students--many raising families, some as single mothers. For these students, finding time to study is a never-ending problem. Serving on the Academic Standards Committee, Abbott sees an inability to find time for schoolwork as the number-one reason students flunk out. He recognizes this is a problem without easy solutions. But he encourages students to cut back on their work hours as much as possible, while looking for ways to reduce expenses. In the long run, he stresses, it's their education which will best alleviate the economic pressures on their lives.
As an administrator, Abbott has worked for eight years as a department head, and for seven of those years he's also been dean. His proudest accomplishment as chair is his establishment of a program that sends Tech business professors to the state capitol to teach upper-division courses in the evening to place-bound students who've already completed two years at Helena's College of Technology. In this way, the students are able to earn Montana Tech degrees. Starting with just five students, the program now serves 35. As dean, Doug is most pleased with the lead he took, several years back, in splitting Montana Tech's old Humanities and Social Sciences Department into two new degree programs: Liberal Studies, and Professional and Technical Communications. The change entailed appointing two new department heads, with whom Abbott pored minutely over the old HSS curriculum, parceling out all the courses into the new programs. The process taxed Abbott's diplomatic skills, but it paid off. At present, the LS program has 96 students and the PTC program 65.
Unlike some at Montana Tech, Abbott does not see a conflict between the engineering and non-engineering sides of the campus. Once exclusively a School of Mines, Montana Tech has changed, as it must says Doug, in order to keep pace with demographic, social, and economic alterations in the society at large. For Abbott, it's simply a matter of meeting consumer needs. He points out that, after General Engineering, the two most heavily enrolled programs at Tech are both non-engineering: Nursing, followed closely by Business. But the success of Tech's non-engineering programs needn't inspire anxiety among the engineering faculty. On the contrary, high-enrollment courses in such programs as Nursing and Business can help subsidize lower-enrollment courses in engineering and elsewhere. Doug laments, however, that it's proved so difficult to rid ordinary Montanans of the misperception that Montana Tech is exclusively a Mining Engineering school.
What does Abbott predict may be the consequences for the Montana University System of the recent election of Democrats to the governor's office and the state legislature, and also of the legal victory won by the Montana Federation of Teachers in its lawsuit against the state for funding public education at unconstitutionally low levels? Will the MUS benefit from these developments? Abbott is cautiously optimistic that new Democratic clout in Helena may translate into more adequate levels of funding for the university system. But in regard to the lawsuit, he worries that, should K-12 funding be raised, that additional money might be diverted from the university's budget, especially given Governor Schweitzer's pledge not to raise taxes.
If changes in the university system's financial arrangements occur, Abbott hopes they'll include a re-evaluation of the MUS's funding formula. At present, he believes, state allocations are too narrowly tied to enrollment numbers. Instead, he advocates allotting a fixed level of funding for each unit that could be revised up or down should enrollment change dramatically. Abbott feels somewhat confident that the Regents and Commissioner of Higher Education Sheila Stearns, and perhaps the Legislature as well, are in the mood to re-examine the system's funding model.
Any such re-examination, Abbott hopes, will take into account that Montana Tech has the highest cost per student of any unit in the university system (due in part to the expensive high-tech equipment used on campus), although the college is not currently funded at a correspondingly higher level. Underfunding has made it increasingly difficult for the school to attract superior faculty and administrators. When, for example, Tech did a job search for a new Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, the search committee hosted a promising candidate from the State University of New York System. Only able to offer him $90,000 a year, the committee pointed out that Montana abounds in scenic beauty and recreational opportunities. The candidate replied, "You can only eat so many trees." If funded at a fairer level, Montana Tech could offer prospective employees not just lots of beautiful trees, but also competitive salaries.
Our interview concluded with Professor Abbott sharing some words of wisdom for new faculty. He advises junior faculty members to do what he did--find a mentor who can show you the ropes. Doug's mentor, Joe Kasperick, constantly reminded Abbott how lucky he was to have a job where, in Joe's words, "you get paid to tell stories." Abbott similarly urges faculty to remember how fortunate they are to be working in a field where you can stay young by associating with students. He encourages teachers to continue their educations, to get involved in their communities, and not to take themselves too seriously.
Abbott is a realist. He knows the impact he can make on individual students is limited, given how many different directions students are pulled in during their college years. But Doug is thrilled that former students contact him regularly, sharing how much they'd enjoyed his classes, and how often they apply what they learned on the job. For Abbott, it's a good life.
[The Montana Professor 15.2, Spring 2005 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]