Office Details
Associate Professor
Education
Ph.D., Virginia Polytechnic Institute
M.B.A., The Last Council: Social Security Policymaking as Coalitional Consensus and the 1994-1996 Advisory Council as Institutional Turning Point
B.S., University of North Carolina
Being a latecomer to teaching heightens my appreciation for the exchange of ideas in the classroom. I spent the early part of my career as a programmer, supervisor, and manager in information technology, working for EDS (remembered these days only for its founder, Ross Perot, who ran for president in 1992 and 1996).
Getting my MBA enabled me to swap COBOL (programming language) for spreadsheets by becoming a government contractor, where I consulted with federal agencies, chiefly the U.S. Courts, for more than a dozen years. Conducting cost-benefit analysis and developing programmatic and financial documents for government clients served as an entrée to bureaucratic life: engendering an enduring respect for public servants. They deal with profound deficits of resources and excesses of guidance, yet manage to further the public interest. Learning the conceptual language to analyze public and nonprofit missions and their political and organizational processes required a doctoral degree in public administration, which took 10 years. Definitely worth it, because of getting to teach at The University of Baltimore!
After obtaining my graduate education while working, UBalt’s mission always made perfect sense. The part-time student’s challenges are second nature. I love teaching, while remembering what it feels like from the other side, and do my best to keep the learning experience mutual, engaging and light. Because the only way to teach or support others pursuing a research degree is as a fellow researcher, my two decades of scholarship on Social Security continue.
My wife and sweetheart of 40+ years and I have restored a century-old house in the Shenandoah Valley. Our son became a college academic advisor and success coach, following a half-dozen years of teaching English literature, and has published books of poetry and literary criticism.
Implications of historical Social Security policymaking for looming fiscal "crunch."
Courses in public finance, performance management, and organizational innovation at the masters level and in general methodology at the doctoral level.
Other
Lyles, A., & Gibson, E. (2021). What 9/11 and Jan 6 have in common: Ignoring first responders.. Fayetteville Observer.
"Policymakers' Engagement in Fiscal Trials of U.S. Social Security from 1937 to 1983" (Writing Results)
This analysis will apply Alan Jacobs’s theory of intertemporal policy by concentrating on past episodes comparable to the looming challenge posed by financing Social Security. Relevance for the near future can be expected from the comparability of issues along the two dimensions of investment and contributive distribution, involved in four trials. These trials include the most recent, concluding in the 1983 amendments, popularly associated with the Greenspan Commission; the previous resolution achieved in 1977, involving the U.S.'s largest peacetime tax increase; and two earlier resolutions dating to Social Security’s initial decades.