2000-4 Winter - Northwestern State University Alumni

Faculty Notes
Elliott selected as Kilpatrick Life
Professor of Insurance
Dr. Stephen Elliott has been
named the Kilpatrick Life
Professor of Insurance at Northwestern
State University. Elliott
has been a member of NSU’s faculty
for 20 years.
Elliott earned his doctorate in economics and finance
at Louisiana Tech University. He has extensive
experience in insurance, financial planning, banking,
real estate and as an economic consultant.
While on Northwestern’s faculty, Elliott has consulted
with most of the major textbook publishers on
finance texts. His research has also been published
regularly in a variety of national and international
professional journals. Elliott has also been a frequent
presenter at regional and national conferences.
“This professorship will be a tremendous benefit
for me in my teaching and scholarship,” said Elliott.
“I will be able to conduct research that will keep me
up to date in my field. That knowledge will be brought
back to the classroom and shared with the students.”
The professorship was created with a $60,000 donation
from Kilpatrick Life Insurance Company. The
donation was matched with an additional $40,000
from the Board of Regents Support Fund. A portion of
the interest generated by the endowment each year will
be used to fund classroom instruction, faculty research,
purchase needed software and hardware and cover
needed travel to professional conferences. The remaining
portion will be used to build up the endowment.
The College of Business is accredited by the American
Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business
(AACSB), the primary accrediting agency and service
organization for business schools in the United
States.The accreditation covers baccalaureate degree
programs in business offered by Northwestern.
Elliott plans to conduct research on several aspects
of insurance including consumer purchasing of insurance,
regulations affecting insurance and how consumers
make decisions on the purchasing of insurance. III
Pollacia is recipient of
the BellSouth Endowed
Professorship in
Telecommunications
When Dr. Lissa Pollacia, an associate professor
of Computer Information Systems at Northwestern,
taught her first course via the Internet in
1996, it was to a group of students with little or no
knowledge about the Internet.
“My thinking was, what better way to teach the
Internet than to utilize the Internet,” she said.
Pollacia, who was one of the first faculty members at
NSU to teach an undergraduate course entirely online,
is the first recipient of the BellSouth Endowed Professorship
in Telecommunications. Her Internet course,
“Understanding and Utilizing the Internet,” was the
first online course accepted by the Southern Region
Electronic Campus from the state of Louisiana.
Pollacia has been on NSU’s faculty for 13 years. She
earned her bachelor of science in mathematics education
and her master of science in mathematics from
Northwestern. She earned her master of science in
computer science and her doctorate in computer science
from the University of Southwestern Louisiana.
She was the principal investigator for a Board of
Regents grant for training in the theory and practice of
online education. The grant “Creating Global Classrooms
via Internet Technology” provided both equipment
and training to expand online offerings to include
other computer courses and a mathematics course.
The BellSouth Endowed Professorship in Telecommunications
was established in 1998. BellSouth donated
$60,000, which was matched with $40,000 from
the Board of Regents’ Support Fund. When the professorship
was established, Herschel Abbott, president
of BellSouth’s Louisiana operations said the professorship
would mesh with the company’s goal of
utilizing telecommunications technology to bring
about change in the state’s educational system. III
Leading literary journal publishes faculty member’s poem
The experiences of a summer job several years ago are still vivid to Julie Kane. The assistant professor of
English at Northwestern State University expressed those experiences in a poem published in a prestigious
literary journal.
Kane’s poem, “The Bottle Factory” appears in the fall edition of The Southern Review.
“The poem is about the summer between high school and college when I worked in a bottle factory,” said Kane,
who joined NSU’s faculty last fall. “I did packing and was a machine operator silk screening onto plastic bottles.”
“In the poem, I drew a contrast between working with one’s mind and with one’s body doing physical labor. You
get satisfaction from physical work that one does not get immediately from mental work even though both are
difficult. With physical labor, you see the accomplishments immediately.” III
Alumni Columns Winter 2000 / 7