CUE Home >> Alumni and Development >> Endowed Professorship Keeps Focus on Teaching

CUE 2004

ALUMNI PROFILES
Endowed Professorship Keeps Focus  on Teaching

Jack Woodhull

CU-Boulder has grown into a bigger school with more outstanding high-tech facilities than students in the 1950s may ever have imagined. But for Jack Woodhull (EngrPhys '57, MS ApMath '60), "the most important part of teaching is still a piece of chalk and a blackboard."

That's why he decided to endow the Woodhull/Logicon Teaching Professorship, a position now held by James Curry in Applied Mathematics. The endowment supplements a professor's salary, which provides support to the department and helps CU keep its best and brightest teachers.

"The quality of the instruction is terribly important," says Woodhull. "We had some very good professors when I was there, and the school still does."

A native of California, Woodhull says he enjoyed everything he did as a student in Boulder. "I liked my classes. I was in a fraternity. It was a great experience there." After graduation, he was commissioned in the Navy through the ROTC program, but he soon returned to Boulder to get a master's degree.

After that, his two technical degrees combined with Navy experience landed him a position at Logicon, a defense contractor for software and electronic systems where he quickly rose to become president and chief executive officer.