Associate Professor Clifton Sutton will retire from the CEC Department of Statistics at the end of the spring semester. A long-time faculty member Sutton earned his master’s and PhD from Stanford University. As director of the Statistical Consulting Center at Mason, he worked with researchers from many programs on campus; advising them on experimental design and helping them do their data analysis. Among his more interesting Mason clients was former head men’s basketball coach, Jim Larranaga, who wanted to gain some insight into the effectiveness of various offensive and defensive strategies. With Sutton’s current research interest in online sports betting, basketball still has a role to play. Sutton said that the weeks during March Madness were extremely busy for him as he collected the data he needed.
When Sutton was asked to write something about his time at Mason, he offered reflections about his first years in the late 1980s, when the university was so different.
As I near the end of my 37th and final academic year at GMU, I often think about my earliest years. When I arrived on campus only several days before classes started, I moved into a small office having a gray metal desk, a gray metal file cabinet and two gray metal bookshelves. The department secretary (that’s what the office help was called back then) thought it looked so dreary that she asked the department chairman if she could buy a red dictionary to put on one of the shelves before I arrived. That dictionary was the only “start-up package” I got.
During my first semester, I was shocked to find that the Engineering building was locked during the weekends, and most faculty were not given keys. Fortunately, that situation soon changed … first illegally, but then finally, legally. I was also shocked that I had to walk to the distant edge of campus to pick up my computer printouts. In 1987 there was no way to view a pdf of your draft produced using TeX; one had to look at a printout. And regarding computers, GMU didn’t see fit to give me one for more than two years! Originally, I had to use a dumb terminal that I had bought during graduate school, which I connected to the GMU mainframes via modem. All of this reminds me of that older relative who talked about having to walk a mile to school when he was a kid, and then a mile back home, with it being uphill both ways.
Fortunately, the challenges I faced during my early years all eventually disappeared, and my work life became more enjoyable. But despite the initial inconveniences, I loved my new job. The older faculty treated me well, and many (but certainly not all) of the students were wonderful, with a few of them becoming friends that I interacted with for many years after they graduated. Now those years have added up to decades.
Sutton says he is proudest of his accomplishments in teaching and service. A Teaching Excellence Award winner, he served as the department’s graduate program coordinator and was instrumental in leadership positions on both the Faculty Senate and the General Education Committee. He was so dedicated to teaching he never missed a class due to illness for 37 years. Sutton says one of his greatest accomplishments was to get the engineering school programs more involved in the university’s general education program, which led to a tremendous increase in enrollment, and subsequently, the growth of two departments within the College of Engineering and Computing.