I have spent a significant portion of my professional life oscillating between two worlds: the chaotic, fast-paced reality of software engineering and the slow, often suffocating bureaucracy of academia.
For six years, I served as an Instructor and Coordinator for the Computer Information Systems program at Amarillo College. My philosophy was simple: teach the “why” behind the code. I wanted my students to understand that a programming language is just a tool, not the destination. I brought real-world industry challenges into the syllabus because, in the actual workforce, nobody gives you a sanitized textbook problem with a provided answer key. In the workforce, the requirements change mid-sprint, the API documentation is a lie, and the server is on fire.
I wanted my students to be ready for the fire.
The Ivory Tower and the Elected Paper-Pushers
However, as any educator can tell you, the actual act of teaching is often the easiest part. The hard part is dealing with the administrative layer: specifically, those esteemed elected board regents who seem to believe that “technology” is something that happens in a magic box and that a curriculum should be frozen in amber for a decade as long as it fits their view and their perspective.
There is a particular brand of special frustration that comes from presenting a data-driven argument for updating a program’s infrastructure, only to be met by a board of regents who haven’t opened a command prompt since the Clinton administration. These individuals, often appointed for their “community leadership” (read: ability to attend a luncheon), treat technical education like a static vocational trade from 1954.
To a regent, a “successful program” is one that looks good on a brochure. To a practitioner, a successful program is one where the students can actually build a production-grade application without having a panic attack.
The Escape Velocity
Eventually, the friction becomes too much. When you spend more time justifying the existence of a modern lab than you do actually teaching in it, you realize that the “Ivory Tower” is actually just a very expensive silo.
This is why I shifted my focus toward the startup world and my own consultancy. In the realm of cloud-native platforms I discovered the joy of actual agility. When I design a cloud-native platform merging GIS and AI I don’t have to wait for a quarterly board meeting to decide if “AI” is an acceptable topic of study. I just build it, and test it, and break it, and fix it (hopefully).
That is how learning actually happens. It happens through failure and iteration, not through the approval of a committee of people who think “The Cloud” is a weather pattern.
The Legacy of the “Cynical” Teacher
People ask me why I still care about mentorship and why I volunteer for FIRST Robotics and why I pursued a Ph.D. in Information Systems despite my disdain for administrative bloat.
The answer is simple: the students.
(Some) students are brilliant, hungry, and capable of far more than the bureaucrats give them credit for. They deserve mentors who aren’t afraid to tell them that the textbook is outdated and that the real world doesn’t care about their GPA: it cares if their code works.
I may be cynical about the institutions, and I may still have a lingering grudge against every board regent who ever tried to “streamline” a technical curriculum into oblivion, but I am still invested in the talent.
Education should be a bridge to the industry, not a barrier to it.