Bob McConaughy is an adjunct assistant professor of history at Austin Community College. He is in his second year with the school, teaching primarily History I at the Rio Grande Campus. He also teaches an advanced placement History II class at Georgetown High School. He is known for a unique teaching approach, which he attributes to his business background.
Q: Based on ratemyprofessor.com reviews, students typically say your class is very "easy." Why do you think that is?
A: My approach is very different. I have 200-400 PowerPoint slides per chapter that I will show students to engage them. I think it's just style and approach. It's not that I know more history than anybody else, not by any means, because there are some exceptional teachers here, but my approach is different than most. I want students to see images of the events we talk about.
Q: What did you do before teaching?
A: For the last 35 years before I came here…I worked full time as, at one point, the vice president of a major Fortune 500 company. I hated every day of my life. I was a child of the '60s and always wanted to be a history professor, but I ended up - for family and other reasons - going to business school and ended up working for Fortune 500 companies. That was too straight-jacket for me so I became a management consultant for big companies. It was all about how they could change their organizations; it was okay. [But] at the end of the day, it was not what I wanted to do.
Q: How did you come to teach at ACC?
A: After I sent my daughter to A&M I moved to Austin from Dallas. I signed up and took Al Purcell's classes in history and got to know him real well. Believe it or not, I have wanted to be a history teacher all of my life and one day out of the clear blue he said, "I've got a teaching opening. Would you like to teach?" That was two years ago.
Q: What do you believe is special about the community college experience?
A: The contact is what is so enriching here. I have 36 students in my classes. A History class at UT will have up to 500 students with teaching assistants who are told how to grade and what grades to give. If students are committed to doing as well as they can, they will thrive in the community college environment. They get [help] from various teachers in every department. I will personally sit down with a student for an hour before an exam.
Q: In your lectures you are known for taking unpopular stances on historical topics, notably referring to Columbus as "a brutal bastard."
A: [Laughs] I am not doing that to trash anybody, but to put it on the table for people. I make the point that when I was in junior high school and elementary school we had Columbus Day off - we celebrated Columbus. He was a brave man. It is also a fact and a reality that he was the first major enslaver of the Spanish empire and in this hemisphere. I try to be very even-handed all the way through about Columbus and Thomas Jefferson. I try to clear up misunderstandings about the people we put up on pedestals, like the founding fathers. This country was anything but "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; all men are created equal" up to, including and after the Civil War and maybe up until today's time. It was [only] okay if you were a propertied white male.
Q: What are your goals in teaching students?
A: So many students will tell me at the beginning of the semester, "Oh God, I hate history and I wish I didn't have to take it. I hate reading books and this is going to be terrible." Sixteen weeks later I want them to say, "Wow, this was fun, and I didn't think I could learn this much."
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