Business and Industry | Lion VoicesOctober 19, 2023

Faculty Voices: Dr. Jim Beard

Written By: Ian Silvester

The University of Arkansas – Fort Smith has been home to Associate Professor of Management Dr. Jim Beard for the last two decades. After the academic year, his time at UAFS will end, but his legacy will remain.

Arriving at UAFS in 2003, Beard brought a lifetime of experience to share with his students amid his renewed desire to teach.

“To tell you the truth, the one thing I missed the most was interacting with students,” he shared, recounting the years he spent working in advertising and at Tyson corporate offices.

However, Beard’s journey to teaching – or rather getting back to teaching – was well-traveled. By the time he was earning his master’s and doctoral degrees, Beard was “the same age as the professors.”

“I kept leaving school because my careers got in the way,” he joked.

Beard grew up in St. Louis, earning a scholarship to Drury University in Springfield, Missouri. At 18, he found himself in college as a first-generation student and in love with Lorna Heatherly, the woman who would become his wife – they now approach their 60^th wedding anniversary – but a war on the other side of the globe pulled him away from his studies.

“There was this thing called the Vietnam War going on in 1966,” Beard recalled. Not wanting to be drafted, he enlisted in the Air Force, where he became a Russian linguist, but only after “they sent me right back to university, to Syracuse University.”

Beard, Lorna, and their daughter Laura called England home from 1967 and 1968, where he conducted electronic espionage on the Soviet space program for the United States Air Force Security Service. During his final year in Washington, DC, he was a Soviet analyst at the National Security Agency.

After leaving the Air Force, Beard looked to return to the classroom on the GI Bill. He picked back up at the University of Maryland College Park before transferring to the University of Kansas. It was in Lawrence that life would once again force him to take a detour from his education.

“Two-thirds of the way through my bachelor’s degree, I got involved in a 20-year career,” he laughed.

Listening to the FM airwaves in Lawrence Monday through Friday, from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m., listeners would have caught Beard hosting a talk show and playing jazz on a show called “Jazz in the Night.” Through his talk show, Beard discussed news and traveled to Oregon to cover a political referendum where he met the late author Ken Kesey, author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Beard became friends with Kesey, and his family moved to Oregon, where his radio career continued as the program director for Eugene’s top rock station.

Beard and his family spent the next two years in Oregon before moving on Thanksgiving Day, 1977, to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where they have remained. Once in the Natural State, Beard continued working in radio before being pulled away to work at an advertising agency, where he became vice president. However, during this time, Beard decided it was time for his education to take priority over his career.

“I took a chance and went to the University of Arkansas and finished my bachelor’s degree (Communications) in like two semesters,” Beard said. “There, I discovered that what I wanted to do was to become a college professor.”

Realizing his new path, Beard earned his master’s in communications in 14 months and began a fellowship in Illinois at Northwestern University for his doctorate. In Communication Studies. While at Northwestern, Beard cut his teeth teaching before being offered a job at the University of Arkansas.

He taught for a handful of years but was once again roped back into the corporate world, working in management training in business ethics, leadership, and business communication for Tyson. A buyout left Beard having “a nice refreshing beverage with an umbrella in the backyard” every night. Still, his wife, then teaching anthropology at UAFS, found a way to bring him back into the educational fold.

Joking that his wife conspired with their neighbor, the UAFS Dean of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Karen Stauffaker, to give his CV to Roger Roderick, Dean of the Business School. Beard soon met with Roderick, being sold on the idea of building the UAFS business school from scratch.

“I thought that it might be fun to take part in the cultural shift happening here, and maybe I could influence the culture a little bit,” he recalled. “Man, it has been one heck of a ride.”

In the 20 years since that pitch, Beard has had his fingers on making the UAFS College of Business and Industry (CBI) what it is today.

“I loved the excitement about building the business school from scratch. There was never a routine day. … We were not just the current faculty of this business school; we are the founding faculty of this. We were the people who created a business school for people we will never know,” Beard explained.

Throughout his initial years at UAFS, Beard worked to make the university accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, a blue-chip accreditation only 6% of the world’s business schools have earned. Ensuring that CBI meets the highest standards of excellence in teaching, research, curriculum, and learner success is a significant part of Beard’s legacy as Department Head of Business Administration from 2009 to 2014.

He has been on nearly every major committee on the UAFS campus, helped lay the foundation for the Babb Center for Career Services, and taught UAFS students for two decades.

But now, in the twilight of his career, Beard reflects on the life he’s built, the jobs he’s held, the lives he’s touched, and the university he has helped mold as he prepares to leave. He does so not with nostalgia but with an excitement for what comes next.

“The question we always ask is ‘what am I going to do when I retire,’” he said. “You define yourself by what you do; retirement is an opportunity to transcend that. You no longer have to do. You can choose to do, but you don’t have to do. So, the question is, ‘Who am I going to be?’ I have not asked that question in my life as the primary question. So, instead of what I am going to do, and what does that say about who I am. I’m going to say, who am I, and what does that say about what I’m going to do.”