UA Profs. Practice What They Teach

The saying goes: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.”
However, there are a select few professors at the University of Arkansas who do both. And their students benefit from their instructor’s real-world experience.
“Hopefully, it helps my students relate to a situation better,” said John W. Cole, a full-time marketing professor who owns Walker Brothers Dry Goods, a high-end clothier in Fayetteville. “But it’s a fine line that I walk. I don’t want to bore them with my business war stories over and over.”
Mark Risk is an adjunct instructor who teaches 12 hours of real estate classes this fall. That’s appropriate since he also is the president of The Real Estate Consultants in Fayetteville.
Risk’s company employs four agents and makes between $250,000 and $300,000 in gross revenue a year. It handles real estate brokerage, professional appraisals and property management for clients and its own investments.
“I literally practice what I preach,” said Risk, who has doubled as a business owner and teacher for 25 years.
Students seem to respond better to someone who teaches based on their own experiences, Risk said. He once took field trips with his students to job sites until popularity in real estate classes took off. He even has one class now with 54 students, which makes tours around town impractical.
Risk always tries to draw parallels between real life deals in his instruction. Often, words in a textbook don’t paint the entire picture of the real estate business.
In a recent class, he even incorporated actual sales contracts he handled through his company.
“When they see a real example of how something works, it really helps them understand,” Risk said. “In all my classes, I’m able to share my experiences and they appreciate it because it helps them apply the knowledge of what they are learning to real situations.”
Curt Rom, a professor of horticulture at the UA, gets a first-hand taste of his teachings while helping his father, Roy Rom, run The Rom Family Apple Orchard in east Fayetteville.
Now, he doesn’t make a dime off the profits, but Curt Rom said what he has learned has been worth all the volunteer work over the years. His father also was a professor of horticulture and got involved in the apple business in an effort to gain practical experience for use in his classes.
“As they say, a rotten apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree,” Rom joked.
Like his father, Rom wanted real life experiences to cart back to class. He uses trips to the farmer’s market as a backdrop for everything from consumer tendencies to environmental market factors in an attempt to help students better understand the curriculum.
“Most of the information I give in class is kind of science-based technology,” Rom said. “But it takes on a whole new dimension when you see the end product. You can visit with consumers, so you’ve got a pretty direct connection to what consumers want and what they expect.
“Then, you can take that right back to the classroom.”
None of the three divulged teaching salaries, but each admitted they could live comfortably minus their moonlighting in personal business ventures.
They do it to benefit their students.