 "Photo: N/A")
Editor's note: Bob Womack passed away on April 17, 2010, about six months after this presentation was published. Read more here.
Hundreds of books stand at attention on wooden shelves as they stare down at Bob Womack while he reads over a rough draft of his fifth book. The 86-year-old professor – the oldest at MTSU – doesn’t let his attention become diverted while working in his office on the third floor of Jones Hall.
Though he is an educational leadership professor at the university, none of his books are about education. They pertain to various subject matter including history, horses and politics. One of the key topics in his latest work is religion.
“What I try to do is inject the element of reason in religion,” says Womack, commonly known by acquaintances and close friends alike as Dr. Bob. “Much of religion is unreasonable. I try to drain those myths and superstitions out of religion and substitute reason in their place.”
Discussing sometimes controversial topics, like religion, in the classroom and forcing students to “engage in self-examination” as he calls it, has helped establish Dr. Bob as a man who is not afraid to mentally challenge students or be challenged in return.
“If there was a modern-day Socrates, it would be Bob Womack,” says Terry Weeks, an educational leadership professor who has been a colleague of Dr. Bob for 20 years, as well as co-authored a Tennessee history textbook with him.
Though he may not have gained the same level of recognition that Socrates has, Dr. Bob’s legacy, at least in MTSU community, is impossible not to notice.
The Curriculum Collection in the James E. Walker Library is dedicated to Dr. Bob and his deceased wife, Elizabeth, and the Department of Educational Leadership was renamed the Womack Family Educational Leadership Department because of the impact he and his family have had on MTSU. There isn’t any relation, though, to Womack Lane, a road on the outskirts of the university’s campus.
“I said, ‘I’ve only been here two weeks and they’ve already named a road for me,’ which wasn’t true,” Dr. Bob says of when he arrived at MTSU as a student in 1941.
Dr. Bob, who has taught at the university since 1957, has four children, including former State Senator Andy Womack and current MTSU Business Law Professor Lara Daniel, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
“I don’t do it as well as he did,” Daniel says of her father’s mentally provocative teaching style. “But I’ve learned from watching him.”
The majority of his family old enough to attend college came to MTSU, including all four of his children. The only current student is Dr. Bob’s granddaughter, Marguerite Sims, who says she lives her life trying to “carry on that Womack tradition.”
“It’s very honoring to be able to say Dr. Bob Womack is my grandfather,” says Sims, a junior early childhood education major. “He’s taught me to continue to stay motivated and try harder and harder and to never give up.”
The creation of the Womack-MTSU legacy didn’t start with Dr. Bob. His older brother attended MTSU when the university was known as Middle Tennessee State Normal School in the early part of the 20th century. His two older sisters and other older brother later enrolled, and then in 1941, Dr. Bob began his undergraduate career at the university. He moved from his farm in Flat Creek, Tenn. to the third floor of Jones Hall which was then a dorm, and 68 years later, is the same floor where is office is today.
“It was a good atmosphere [and] we were well-behaved students,” he says with a look of reflection. “Really, there was very little hanky-panky going on here then. We were generally rural students – came from farms [with] pretty strict morals.”
In spite of his eagerness to receive work toward his doctorate and begin his career, it took Dr. Bob seven years to complete his undergraduate work because of a conflict taking place on the other side of the world.
“I was on the first floor [of Jones Hall] the day Pearl Harbor was bombed,” Dr. Bob remembers. “I was down there listening to the radio, and they interrupted the radio and said that Pearl Harbor had been bombed – that didn’t mean anything to me, I didn’t know where Pearl Harbor was.”
That meaning, he says, began to fall into place very quickly. He enlisted into the Navy in 1943 and fought in World War II for three years.
Though he doesn’t like to talk about the conflict, he has great respect for the opportunities that came out of it, mainly the G.I. Bill of Rights, which paid for Dr. Bob’s, as well as many other soldiers’, tuition.
“It redid education,” he says of the bill. “Soldiers had money to come to school on.”
Dr. Bob predicts that when he started college, about 350 students attended MTSU and there were only five buildings: Kirksey Old Main, Jones Hall, Rutledge Hall, Lyons Hall and a cafeteria. As the student population blossomed and more buildings started to pop up, he says the university began to establish itself as something it is still stereotyped as today: a commuter college.
“Long time ago, most of the student body lived on campus,” he says. “But after World War II, (the students) dispersed. It became a commuter college – still is.”
1 comments