While at ACU I have engaged in a variety of collegial activities.
Breaking bread, not bad
I have been a regular in the COBA group that attends Taco Tuesday (though strangely, few of us actually get tacos). I have also helped play a role in getting COBA faculty to walk to Rosa’s instead of driving their cars. Although it is only 1.2 miles roundtrip, it is better for our health, the environment, conversations, and our resulting relationships to walk rather than drive. (If you drive on Judge Ely at about 11:05am on a Tuesday during the school year you may very well see a herd of five to seven faculty members trekking to Rosa’s.) Continuing with lunch, I also regularly eat with SITC faculty members — plus Katie Wick — in our faculty lounge, either playing probability games or discussing teaching or research (see Figure 4.1). This has spurred a monthly game lunch co-hosted with John Homer in the Adams Center, allowing us to get to know others across campus with similar interests. I have further eaten lunch in dyads with a variety of non-COBA faculty, including Bob McKelvain, Steve Allison, Steve Wages, Matt Garver, Todd Womble, Suzie Macaluso, and Randy Harris. Some of these conversations have led to collaborative research projects.
Figure 4.1. Reinforcement learning values from Call My Bluff performance. During lunch with SITC faculty we often play games, our multi-year favorite being Call My Bluff. Because we are nerds, we used reinforcement learning theory to determine who was the best. I am ahead of John Homer by approximately .001. All the listed players were faculty members who regularly played and the data is from Spring 2016. We have another graph which demonstrates the same raw data using a different method and I finished in the lead in it, too.
ACUFIFA: Football for the old guys
Another area of my collegiality is that, together with Matt Garver, I helped establish ACUFIFA (officially ACU Federation of Interdepartmental Football Aficionados, named by Andy Little), a soccer group with an associated mailing list (now maintained primarily by Kyle Tippens) for related scrimmages and discussions, initially for ACU faculty, staff, and alumni. Since our early days in Fall 2011 in Bennett gym with five people (including Don Pope, David Kneip, and Kilnam Cha) playing for approximately an hour a week, it has blossomed into twice weekly 1.5 hour sessions regularly attended by 10-25 players. By Fall 2012 it had spawned an intramural faculty/staff/grad student soccer team, the Sunflowers of Death (also named by Andy Little), which has competed every semester since, finishing second place on six occasions (Figure 4.2), finally winning in Fall 2019!. To accommodate burgeoning demand for spots on the team, Kilnam Cha started another faculty/staff/grad student team, the Ten Plagues (yet again named by Andy Little). It has provided a wonderful outlet for us, the faculty, to pursue something we love together in a relaxed and fun atmosphere.
Figure 4.2. Sunflowers of Death in our first season of intramural soccer.
It is difficult to estimate how many different individuals have played with us over these past five years. I can generate a list of more than 20 current or former faculty members who have shown up to play at least once (Ryan Jessup, Matt Garver, Kilnam Cha, Daniel Garcia, Kyle Tippens, Brent Reeves, David Kneip, Don Pope, Andy Little, Jonathan Huddleston, Dwayne Towell, Nil Santana, Nathan Gibbs, James Prather, John Homer, Ray Petit, Doug Mendenhall, Rob Byrd, Neal Coates, Houston Heflin, and Vik McCracken), a similar number of staff, even more grad students, and far more undergrads and alumni, indicating that this group has benefited many people, and hopefully, like the Noon Basketball Association, will continue to do so for many years to come.
Other sports-like endeavors
I have also participated in Vic McCracken’s dodgeball team, Release the McCrackens, on two occasions. Relatedly, I appeared in a video produced on behalf of the intramural dodgeball competition as well as a video produced by the 2013-2014 Students Association titled “What Do Faculty and Staff Do All Summer?”
Modeling and pranking
Moving away from sports, professor of art Dan McGregor has used both me and my wife as models for the graphic novel that he is working on (see Figure 4.3). Also, I engage in occasional hijinks with those in my department, such as this flyer that I left on Jennifer Golden’s door after she won Departmental Teacher of the Year in her first year of teaching (she did not avail herself of the opportunity) or our inter-departmental nerf gun battle against the accounting & finance department (we won).
Figure 4.3. Posing for and resultant drawing by Dan McGregor, on behalf of his graphic novel.
Closing thoughts
In addition to these items, I have attended multiple Adams Center presentations each year (recorded attendances from my second, third, fourth and fifth, sixth, and eighth years) as well as served on panels and given multiple Adams Center talks. In summary, I believe that I have engaged in collegial behavior and have thoroughly enjoyed the society and spirit reflected in the people of ACU.