Dr. Jay Coleman is UNF’s Newest
Distinguished Professor
Reprinted from InsideUNF July 2005

Jay Coleman likes to rank things and his recent honor of being selected as UNF’s Distinguished Professor of the Year ranks right up there among the accomplishments of which he is proudest.

“This is an honor that in many ways I don’t feel worthy to receive. I’m extremely thankful but when I look at the others who have received this (award) I don’t feel like I’m in the same league,” he said.

Coleman is the Richard deRaismes Kip Professor of Operations Management and Quantitative Methods in the Coggin College of Business. However, most people probably know him as the “Dance Card” man. For several years, Coleman and former UNF faculty member Dr. Allen Lynch have received national publicity for the math model they’ve developed that predicts the college basketball teams to be chosen for the NCAA tournament (aka the “Big Dance”). They have achieved astounding success with the model which yields a 97 percent accuracy rate in some years.

While Coleman is the first to admit that the model is “great fun,” he also sees many applications in his research to classroom teaching.

“I’m very cognizant of the relationship between my research and how it applies to my students in the classroom,” he said. “If we can take this technique (NCAA modeling) and apply it to a problem that so many people can identify with and in a way that can improve the quality of decisions that are made in that area, then we can certainly use it to solve more traditional business problems.”

For example, the techniques used in the NCAA might be used to analyze the performance of a mass mailing campaign. “If you can improve the response rate to a campaign by 1 or 2 percentage points that could amount to millions of dollars in sales,” he noted.

Regardless of the nature of the research, Coleman believes the key to success in the classroom is enthusiasm. “You’ve got to be enthusiastic about what you’re doing. If you’re not enthusiastic, then your students won’t be enthusiastic.”

And in a world of supply and demand, enthusiasm is something Coleman appears to have in abundance. That enthusiasm extends to his outlook about UNF in general and the Coggin College of Business in particular.

Although he still considers himself a “junior faculty member,” he acknowledges that he has seen dramatic changes at UNF since arriving in 1988 with a doctorate from Clemson University.

“When I started, I was 25 and the average age of our students was much older. Sometimes I’d walk into the classroom and I’d be one of the youngest people in the room. That has completely changed and today I look at younger and younger faces in my classes,” he said.

With a number of senior faculty in the college about to retire in the near future, Coleman also knows that he is considered a mentor. “There’s a lot of new blood in the college and that is exciting to see and I look forward to the opportunity of working with them. I know they look at me as somebody who knows the ropes at UNF even though I don’t think of myself that way.”

One philosophy that Coleman is willing to share with his younger colleagues is his outlook on the relationship between research and teaching at UNF. “I look at research here as being the constraint but not the objective. We should try to maximize our teaching performance and do sufficient research and service to enable us to do our teaching in the best possible way. Obviously at some other institutions, it’s the other way around. I always try to do research on things that have some degree of transferability to the classroom. It allows the building of credibility with the real world and with our ultimate audience which is our students,” he said.

Coleman’s Distinguished Professor award is the latest in a series of awards he has received at UNF. In 1990 he was chosen as a UNF Business Affiliates Professor for a two-year appointment. He was named the Outstanding Graduate Faculty by 1995-96 alumni in the Coggin College of Business masters programs and received the UNF Undergraduate Teaching award in 1991 and 2000 in addition to two other University teaching awards in 1993 and 1996. In 2003, he received both the University Outstanding Scholarship Award and the University Outstanding Service Award.

These awards have not caused Coleman to lose focus on his teaching and research while still managing to have fun. For example his desire to rank things has propelled him to look for a better way for the NCAA to rank football teams, a much more daunting task than ranking basketball teams. He said he’s been working on the problem for years. Even when he’s watching his son at football practice, he’s looking for solutions. That may show better than anything else the passion Coleman brings to all his projects, including teaching.

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