Wake Forest Magazine December 2002 - Past Issues - Wake Forest ...

On the right course
Gordon McCray’s career path
has brought him back to
Wake Forest.
As a teenager in Deland, Fla.,
Gordon E. McCray (’85) was a
competitive skateboarder. All
the hours he spent making
constant course corrections on
his board prepared him well, it
seems, for the many turns his
career in business and education
would take.
A physics major at Wake
Forest, McCray shifted directions
in his first job to industrial
engineering, then zigzagged
to an MBA degree and
a doctorate in information systems,
before doing a nifty 360
maneuver to a faculty appointment
at his alma mater. Now,
the BellSouth Mobility
Technology Professor of
Business at the Calloway
School of Business and
Accountancy has added a new
twist to his routine: an associate
deanship at the school.
McCray will focus primarily
on corporate relations, curriculum
development, degree
program oversight and the
application of technology at
the school. “Gordon’s commitment
to the Calloway School
and its students is extraordinary,”
said Jack Wilkerson,
dean of the Calloway School.
“He is an outstanding classroom
instructor, a productive
scholar and a thoughtful
leader.”
McCray’s first career course
correction came with his first
job with Brunswick Corp.,
C a m p u s C h r o n i c l e
later called Memtec America.
“I was working at the intersection
of mechanical and chemical
engineering in the design
of manufacturing processes
that were computer-designed
and controlled,” he said. “In
that sort of position in that
kind of environment, it seemed
only natural to cross into information
systems.”
After he finished his MBA
at Stetson University in
Deland, he moved into a management
position, and then
Stetson asked him to teach
part-time; he found that he
enjoyed teaching, so it was on
to Florida State, where he completed
a doctoral degree in
information systems in 1994.
“The college job market
tends to be feast or famine, and
unfortunately, that year it was
famine,” he said. “There were
something like 4.3 people
chasing each available position.”
His high standards compounded
his job-search challenge.
“In terms of size, culture,
faculty and student characteristics,
and the like, I
benchmarked each institution
against Wake Forest,” McCray
continued. “I decided that in a
perfect world, I’d be back at
Wake.”
As good fortune would
have it, the Calloway School
needed an information systems
instructor that year, and it
offered a visiting position to
McCray. The following year he
was offered a tenure-track position.
“The stars aligned, is
about all I can say,” he concluded.
“I was very fortunate to
land in my ideal environment.”
During his first year,
McCray proposed a redesign of
the school’s information systems
curriculum. “At that
time, information systems in
business-school curricula suffered
from two maladies,” he
said. “First, it was often
viewed, wrongly, as only partly
within the purview of business.
There was no real sense of how
information systems can be
leveraged to pursue business
strategy. Second, about the
only computer courses business
schools were offering were
‘tools’ courses such as spreadsheets
and word processing.”
Four years later, McCray
and Associate Professor of
Accounting Yvonne Hinson
developed an information systems
degree program. Two
degree options are offered: a
bachelor of science in information
systems, and a five-year
course of study that combines
the bachelor of science in
information systems with a
master of science in accountancy.
The information systems
faculty has grown to three:
McCray; Denise McManus,
who specializes in telecommunications
and networking; and
Bruce Lewis, who concentrates
on e-commerce and database
systems. Twenty-seven students
graduated with a bachelor’s
degree in information systems
last spring and another
10 are in the master’s program.
“It’s a potent combination–rare
yet sought-after,”
McCray said. “[The degree] is
still pretty new, but so far
companies have responded to
it very well.”
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