Mississippi State University (continued)
Somewhere in all of this I took a leave of absence from Mississippi State University
to accept the Stevens Professorship of Computer Science at Birmingham Southern College
in Birmingham, Alabama. Birmingham Southern is a small liberal arts college of about
1,600 students. I rented an apartment in which I slept Monday thru Thursday night.
I left Starkville on Monday morning at 5:30 am in my TR7 arriving at the college about 8.
At noon on Friday I drove back to Starkville. I quickly discovered the students at
Birmingham Southern were much brighter than the average student at Mississippi State.
The average ACT score at MS State was about 18, where at Southern it was around 25.
Most of my Computer Science students were multitalented. A couple of examples, one of my
students was a concert pianist, another played in a rock band and sang the lead in
Jesus Crist Superstar, student presentation. I attended both of the students' productions
and they were very good. Most of the students were headed for graduate school
somewhere in law or medicine or business. None was interested in pursuing a graduate program
in Computer Science. Nancy could have gotten a position at Southern, but in the end she didn’t want to give up her tenured position at State and our home in the woods.
So after one year at Southern I returned to my position at MS State.