Wednesday, July 21, 1999
The University Daily Kansar
Section A · Page 5
Professor juggles duties, finds success
By Sarah Smith Nessel Special to the Kansan
Don't ask Herb Tuttle about pet food.
It's not that he hated his job at Hill's Pet Nutrition in Topeka. But the raw materials sometimes were a little too raw.
I don't know what you visualize when you think of beef byproducts, but I know what I can visualize because I was there for six years." Tuttle said. "A pallet of thawing livers is not a beautiful sight."
Tuttle held several positions during his years with the company, one of several he worked for before becoming an assistant professor at the University of Kansas Edwards Campus in Overland Park four years ago. In addition to teaching, Tuttle serves as associate director of the Edwards Campus engineering management graduate program.
Although Tuttle now manages classrooms rather than manufacturing plants, he has vivid memories of the strong odor of ground meat and ground cereal cooking together at the Hill's plant.
Still, Tuttle said he buys Hill's Science Diet for his pets, and that's no small expense. The Tuttle household in Lawrence includes a dog, a hamster, a turtle, a tortoise, two salamanders, two rabbits and 52 Madagascar hissing cockroaches.
The cockroaches, he explained, joined the household when his youngest son, Peter, now 10, agreed to bring them home from his science class for the summer.
"At that time, there were five or six," Tuttle said. "Now we've got an aquarium full." And, yes, they hiss.
A worthy fight
Even before the menagerie came along, Herb and Jane Tuttle had lived in somewhat unusual circumstances. They met at the State University of New York-Buffalo, where he was working on undergraduate degrees in electronics engineering and industrial technology.
"We met at a fight," said Jane Tuttle, an administrative assistant in the dean of students office at the University. "I was the residence hall director, and he was a resident, and he was in a crowd watching two guys fight."
Herb Tuttle remembers it clearly,
even the date: Oct. 10, 1977.
"I saw her making an advance to stop these two, and I thought, 'This woman doesn't know what she's getting into.' So I went in to help
her." he said.
They were married in 1979, a day after he received a master's degree in industrial technology from Illinois State University. Graduation was on Friday, the wedding was Saturday, and they moved to Kansas on Sunday.
In the two decades since that whirlwind weekend, Berry Tuttle's resume has expanded with accomplishments, both professional and academic. He has worked as a project engineer, project manager, production supervisor, safety director, plant manager and management consultant.
tant in eight different industries. He also co-authored a book on facilities and workplace design and has written articles on team project planning and career planning.
Tuttle: former engineer teaches at Edwards Campus.
Along the way, he's collected more degrees — a master's in
business administration from KU and a master's in engineering management from the University of Tennessee.
"One thing that strikes me about Herb is that he has so many things going on at once, and he's able to balance them all," said Jessica Welch, director of graduate recruiting at the Edwards Campus. "And he does an excellent job of finding time for the prospective students. I'm just amazed."
Continuing school while juggling a family and career is all a matter of attitude. Tuttle said.
"I think sometimes graduate students, particularly the nontraditional graduate students, look at a master's program like they did their undergraduate program — that they've got to get it done in such and such a period of time, a little bit like ripping off an old bandage," Tuttle said. "But I say the attitude has got to be, 'This is my new hobby. One night a week I spend three or four hours with interesting professionals, then sometime during the week I squeeze in six to eight hours worth of homework and reading."
Tuttle is still pursuing his hobby. He's working on a doctorate in engineering management from the University of Alabama through a distance-learning program.
Distance learning, in which students take courses on videotape, the Internet or some other method without meeting regularly for class, is one of Tuttle's passions. He's enthusiastic about his involvement in organizing a distance-learning program based at the Edwards Campus.
Such alternatives are important, Tuttle said, because his students — whom he views as academic customers — often are far removed from the classroom.
"We find that half our students travel half the time doing work for their companies." Tuttle said.
To accommodate business travel, all lectures are made available on videotape, and Tuttle posts his lecture notes and Power Point slides on the Internet.
Everyone has stereotypes about engineers, Tuttle said as he ticked off a list. They're not people people. They're introverted. They can't communicate.
Cheerful and talkative, Tuttle couldn't be further from those stereotypes. He laughs easily and talks earnestly about a class that affects students in significant ways.
Tough questions
In Personal Development for the Engineering Manager, Tuttle asks his students to step away from their immediate concerns and develop a career and life plan.
"A lot of them do a lot of soul searching," he said, adding that many say they've never had such an assignment.
Ine results can be interesting.
"One student called me and said,
'You know, this career writing assignment has been great for me.
As a result, I've decided to divorce my wife and quit the program.'
And he did."
As students in that course learn, anyone coming to Tuttle for career advice can expect some tough questions.
Early influences
Tuttle grew up in Dundee, N.Y., a town of about 3,000 people. Everything there was news.
"I remember when they installed the traffic light," Tuttle said. "It was a big deal. You'd stand on the
corner, and the local policeman would flag people down if they ran through the light."
Dundee's entertainment offerings didn't extend far beyond television and traffic signals, but the town did have an abundance another recreation element: snow.
"If you didn't ski in the wintertime, you didn't do much," said Tuttle, whose sking life suffered a near-fatal blow when he moved to the relative flatlands of Lawrence. He thought his skiing days might be over.
Then he heard about Snow Creek ski area in Weston, Mo.
"I literally drove up in a pair of Dockers pants and a nylon jacket, just out for a day, and there was a ski slope with snow and all that," Tuttle said. "So I grabbed my credit card and went inside, rented equipment and went out and started skiing that same day. And the next year I purchased equipment and was hired by the ski school to teach skiing."
Even in his office during the week, he feeds his self-described addiction to skiing. His computer flashes a series of photos from Winter Park, Colo., and ski conditions and weather information scroll across the screen.
That's not the only eye-catching feature of Tuttle's office. Plastered all over a file cabinet are dozens of magnets. They're from all around the world, Tuttle explains, brought back by students whose jobs took them to Asia, South America, Europe and beyond. The presentation of these magnets to Tuttle has become something of a classroom ritual.
Looking back on his life so far,
Turtle has no relegts.
Past perfect
"There's nothing I want to do over again." he said.
At 43, he's earned a bachelor's degree, three master's degrees and a sense of satisfaction that he's made the right choices. With two sons, he's now involved in Boy Scouts, and he's building a family tradition of spring break trips to Colorado. He's busy with students both in the classroom and on the ski slopes. And he's a walking promotional spot for the Edwards Campus, talking excitedly about its growth and potential.
And finally, he's closing in on that Ph.D.
"This is the degree I've wanted all along." Tuttle said. "So when we get this one done, we're gonna take a long rest."
— Edited by Chad Bettes
Senate moves forward on nuclear security
WASHINGTON — The Senate voted unanimously yesterday to limit debate and move toward voting on a Republican-sponsored bill that would create a new agency in charge of research and security at U.S. nuclear weapons labs.
The Associated Press
The measure addresses concerns, particularly among Republicans, that the Energy Department's cumbersome bureaucracy is unable to balance research funding with the need to secure nuclear secrets.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agreed, 99-0, to move toward a vote on adding the proposal to pending legislation authorizing spending on a wide array of U.S. intelligence programs. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., was absent because of his nephew's plane crash.
The amendment would establish a semi-
autonomous Agency for Nuclear Stewardship to
oversee all nuclear weapons-related activities.
A final vote is expected this week, according to
a representative for Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss.
The bill stems from a series of congressional and Clinton administration evaluations that concluded that the Energy Department was bureaucratically top-heavy and incapable of managing nuclear research and security.
In particular, proponents of the legislation hope to address weaknesses highlighted by the Energy Department's failure to respond for more than a decade to a steady stream of congressional oversight reports indicating security gaps at the weapons labs. In the most recent flap, Clinton administration critics said the Energy Department was slow to respond when its own internal security officials raised alarms about an employee at the Los Alamos, N.M., weapons lab suspected of spying for China.
Meanwhile, the DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California came under harsh scrutiny at a House Commerce subcommittee hearing yesterday, with lawmakers questioning the department's assertions that it is correcting security lapses.
fully independent agency.
No similar measure has yet passed in the House, although Republicans there are working on an even stronger bill that would create a
"Without aggressive and sustained internal and external oversight, Livermore will never fully correct these deficiencies," said the committee chairman, Rep. Tom Bliley, R-Va. "I am not interested in DOE whitewashing, defensive posturing or the administration's all-is-nowwell spin."
C. Bruce Tarter, director of the Livermore lab, said he was confident its nuclear materials and classified information are secure. He said the lab has instituted upgrades in its detection and alarm systems surrounding its plutonium facility, is scanning outgoing e-mail and has tightened access by foreign nationals to unclassified computers.
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