The End of an Era

His biggest dream, always, was to teach at Auburn...

It was a dream that came true for Larry Benefield in 1979 — one that took seed in the early 1960’s when the graduate from rural Handley High School showed up on the Auburn campus as a freshman. The campus was only about 45 miles south of his home in Roanoke, and Benefield had grown up as an Auburn football fan. A starting tackle on his high school squad, he came to Auburn regularly with his parents on football Saturdays.

It was, of course, a different Auburn than the one we see today. Benefield remembers the War Eagle Supper Club as the only place you could buy pizza, the Bonanza Burger as home of the first double decker hamburger, and the Kopper Kettle as the only convenient place for late night eating. The commercial strip between Auburn and Opelika did not exist then — at times it was home to a dairy farm, at others a golf course, amid a widely-spaced scattering of homes. South of Samford Avenue, College Street was a sleepy two-lane that was only lightly developed.

Then as now, the campus was a friendly place. As an undergraduate, the courses could sometimes be less so. Benefield remembers being grateful for a D in Chemistry 103 because it placed him inside the 20 percent of students who passed the class. He relished the classes that clicked for him. While he did not immediately go into civil engineering — considering mechanical or electrical first — he found in civil engineering professor Gene Metz a mentor, whose every class he took.

Metz was a specialist in structures, and so impressed Benefield that he made a decision as an undergraduate to pursue the doctorate, and to teach ... at Auburn.

It would not be a straight path. When Benefield graduated, in 1966, it was the height of the Vietnam war, and he had a military obligation to fulfill. Rather than being drafted, he volunteered for Air Force officer candidate school, and then went to ’Nam as a combat engineer attached to a Red Horse unit (Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron). There he worked on air fields, and was awarded the bronze star medal.

When he returned stateside, Metz — the professor who had made such an impact on him — had retired. Benefield had also been exposed to environmental issues in the service, and as a result, turned his attention to environmental engineering. He completed his master’s degree at Auburn in 1972 in that field.

Following the advice of his peers, and his professors, he went on to receive his Ph.D. elsewhere — at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. The institution later inducted him into the Via Department of Civil Engineering’s Academy of Distinguished Alumni, in ceremonies held in the fall of 2004.

It was 1975 when he graduated, and married his fiancée Mary in Blacksburg, Va. He hoped to return to Auburn to teach. However, the civil engineering department head at the time, Rex Rainer, insisted that Benefield get some experience at another university before he would think about hiring him. Disappointed, he took a job at Mississippi State instead, although he only stayed a year.

The Mississippi State position did, however, cement his ties to a researched-focused academic career, rather than the consulting model that was prevalent at the time. Indeed, as a new assistant professor, he ran the department’s research program, which he would eventually do on a college-wide basis for Auburn.

In 1976, he and Mary moved to the University of Colorado, but he had mixed feelings about making Colorado their permanent home. In 1979 he got a call from a friend who said that a faculty position in environmental engineering had opened at Auburn. When he interviewed with Dean Vincent Haneman and Rainer, who was still department head, he was offered a position as assistant professor. Uneasy with a lateral move, he turned it down.

When Rainer countered with an offer as associate professor, Benefield accepted it, and he and Mary returned to Auburn with their six-month-old daughter Brynna. It was 1979, and only the beginning of a more than three-decade career at Auburn.

Benefield was remembered as a congenial teacher, but also one who assigned a great deal of work to his students. At the same time, he appreciated the subtleties of teaching as an art. “You can’t cram it down their throat” he once remarked. “It just serves to alienate them. Then they become resentful and upset about the workload — and then they become critical.”

Good teaching, Benefield understood, requires a tremendous amount of time in developing techniques for effectively presenting any topic you have to cover. It also required, he noted, the ability to be an entertainer, at least to some degree, as well as being a conveyor of knowledge. His skill in the classroom earned him an Alumni Professorship in the mid ’80s.

In 1989 Benefield became the college’s interim associate dean for research, a position he relinquished a couple of years later to return to teaching as Feagin professor of civil engineering, an endowed position that he would hold until 1992, when he returned to administration as associate dean for academics.

He held the latter position under engineering dean William F. Walker, who would later become provost, and ultimately, president of the institution. Benefield became a familiar sight with Walker, absorbing what he could from the dean in his office, in faculty conferences, and even as a regular lunch partner, often in their favorite restaurant in Hurtsboro, a small town across the line in Chambers County.

His tutelage under Walker would place him in good stead when his mentor moved to Samford Hall. Benefield was first named interim dean in 1998, moving into his position as dean in 2000.

His transition as dean was not an easy one insofar as its timing came in one of the ‘bust’ cycles of state funding to higher education. Deans across campus were instructed by the central administration to find ways to stretch budgets, and the task fell to Benefield to make savings where he could find them. That he endured in this seminal period of his administration probably made a mark on the balance of his administration.

Unable to access funding from strapped state budgets while keeping tuition and fees accessible to students as well, Benefield turned to fundraising, building an efficient development office that would meet, and then exceed campus and college goals during the fund raising campaign held in the first decade of the new century. The fruits of this campaign would ultimately allow the college to finish construction of the Shelby Center for Engineering Technology by providing more than a third of the funding required to complete its second phase. It would also build on earlier efforts to renovate facilities such as Wilmore Laboratories and Ross Hall.

In addition to the bricks and mortar projects that revitalized Auburn Engineering, Benefield was an astute communicator who shared a message of deliberate and goal-oriented progress in all facets of the college’s operation.

While aware of the critics of such arbiters of national rankings as U.S. News & World Report, he was keenly interested in moving the College of Engineering ahead in both instruction and research. To this end, he saw Auburn’s undergraduate engineering program rise as high as 28th, and graduate program rankings increase by 10 points over eight years, to 40th among public institutions. As well, the faculty’s efforts have placed Auburn in the top 50 in research expenditures in each of the past six years.

Indeed, Benefield always had a vision goal, and he never left it. In moving Auburn up in the national rankings, he was keenly aware that there would always be a cluster of wealthy, private schools that could use a halo effect to populate the upper levels of the rankings — and that other engineering deans were working to move their institutions along as well. It was a tough assignment, but he stuck to it.

“There’s no question that it’s going to be difficult to move into the top 20 engineering programs, but that’s where I want Auburn to be,” Benefield often said. “If we haven’t yet reached that goal in terms of how the ranking agencies see it, I want us to be at least performing at that level. If we perform at that level consistently, we will move up in the eyes of our peers and one day, we will find ourselves there.”

He brought the same focus into fundraising for facilities and programs, moving the College of Engineering’s stated goal of $105 million to a total of $116.7 million during the ‘It Begins at Auburn’ development campaign. Beyond the statistical story, Benefield sees his Auburn journey as one of enriching relationships that have followed him throughout his career at Auburn.

“I certainly have to look at [former civil engineering colleagues] Joe Judkins and Joe Morgan as being influential in molding my academic career. Just as my parents had a lot to do with bringing me to Auburn to learn, they had an outsized part in bringing me back to Auburn to teach,” Benefield has said.

“At the same time, I have to look toward the many relationships that I have made with Auburn alumni,” he adds. “I can’t name them here because I don’t want to leave anyone out. However, I have to mention Sam Ginn, whose influence on the college began just as I was heading into the deanship.”

He is a little uncomfortable as he prepares for retirement, “just because I don’t know what lies ahead.”

Indeed, Benefield showed up at the office nearly every Saturday morning when he wasn’t on the road, to find time to think and strategize in relative peace and quiet, or simply to take the week in review as he planned for the upcoming one.

“I plan to support Chris Roberts, the incoming dean, with any kind of help that is requested,” he has commented. “But beyond that, I don’t want to be around to second-guess the programs, goals and planning that he will bring to the table. I see it as counterproductive.”

He and Mary are relatively new grandparents, so he does plan to take more time with his family, which includes Brynna, her husband Richard, their daughter Zosia and his son Bryan, who was born in Auburn in 1983. He may consider consulting on a schedule that he feels represents a good balance between his professional abilities and personal opportunities.

And he will take the time, at homecoming this fall, to attend a ceremony in which the laboratories in the new Advanced Engineering Research Laboratories will be collectively named as the Benefield Laboratories. It will be a fitting tribute to one whose belief in research — and whose love of Auburn — has never wavered.

Taking the Reins

At the end of June, Larry Benefield will officially relinquish his duties as dean of the College of Engineering, and will hand the reins over to Chris Roberts, department chair and Uthlaut professor of chemical engineering at Auburn.

“I have had the opportunity to watch Dr. Roberts develop from a dynamic young faculty member who excelled in both instruction and research to a very efficient and effective department chair,” says Benefield. “He is brilliant, innovative and creative with incredible personal skills. He will bring these attributes to his new position as dean and without question will do an outstanding job.”

Roberts, who earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Missouri and a master’s and doctorate in chemical engineering from the University of Notre Dame, came to Auburn in 1994 as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and has been chair of that department since 2003. He has a strong record of scholarly and academic achievement in nanotechnology and synthetic fuels, and has published more than 110 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters in leading chemical engineering, chemistry, materials and related journals.

In addition, he has been the principal investigator or co-principal investigator on more than $16 million in extramurally funded research contracts and grants at Auburn University from agencies such as the National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy, Department of Defense, Department of Agriculture, and National Energy Technology Lab, as well as industrial sponsors and others.

“Dr. Roberts has an outstanding record of achievement in teaching and research and has demonstrated exceptional leadership as chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering,” said Interim Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Timothy Boosinger. “I am confident that he has the ability to significantly advance the college’s mission.”

Roberts will become dean effective July 1. “I am extremely pleased and humbled to have been appointed as the new dean of the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering,” he said. “I certainly look forward to assisting our students and faculty to reach our full collective potential, and we will continue our trajectory of becoming one of the truly premier colleges of engineering in the nation.”