Faculty Accomplishments
Influencing young leaders
Students around the country have used David West’s textbooks on finance, but his greatest satisfaction is hearing from some of his 11,000 students who say he changed their lives during his 40-year (and counting) career. West says endowments help attract and retain quality faculty in a highly competitive market.
David West is the Collier Turley Martin Tucker (CTMT) Faculty Scholar of Finance.
CTMT president Mark Burkhart, BS BA '76, says West personifies the quality business education provided by Mizzou.
West says the success of alumni like Burkhart inspires his commitment to teaching. “I have students now whose parents I taught 40 years ago,” West says. “That couldn’t have happened if I hadn’t stayed in one spot for a long time. Our students are the future.”
He counts his academic careers in spheres of interest: public utility finance, health care finance and real estate finance, accompanied by stints in textbook writing, departmental administration and campus politics as well.
His record of accomplishments would have seemed impossible to him as a 16-year-old recovering from polio. “I took inventory and found out I couldn’t do the things I used to do; all I had left was my head.”
West, who uses a wheelchair, said he was scared to death when he went to college to study economics and business. “I had the great good fortune to marry my wife, Jane, who insisted I could do it,” he says. He found college courses so energizing he never considered doing anything but becoming a teacher. He taught at two private colleges before coming to Mizzou in 1966.
“As life went on, I became less enamored with theoretical models and more interested in real problems,” West says. He tackled issues like public utilities and health care because of his interest in government’s role in the market to promote efficiency and quality of life. “We can make changes that create a better world in which to live,” he says.
West’s longevity at one institution is unusual these days. New faculty members are more attuned to the marketplace, and more likely to get involved in bidding wars, he says. His endowed position supports his research and provides a graduate assistant.