An inspiration to his students and his colleagues. A representative of what the heart of education and the value of applied learning is all about. A professor who has changed the lives of everybody in his classes.
These are just a handful of the ways Kogod finance professor Tim Timura was described last week at a ceremony, where he was installed as the inaugural Nulsen Endowed Professor of Practice. The event was packed with attendees, including Timura’s family, his fellow faculty, Kogod alumni and award namesake Charlie Nulsen, and dozens of his past and present students. By the time Timura took the stage for his inaugural address, the audience had already heard testaments to his impact and commitment from five colleagues, and the mood was celebratory and grateful.
“I can’t be more humbled than I am at this gathering today,” Timura said. “You are all the reason that I’m here.”
An advocate and pioneer in experiential learning, Timura has taught at the collegiate level for thirty-nine years. In his time at Kogod, he has developed and launched over ten courses, including two unique student-run investment funds that enable students to learn investing using a portion of the university’s endowment. Lily Oelschlager, one of Timura’s students and the current managing director of the Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), introduced Timura at the event, marking the first time in the university's history that a student has spoken at an endowment ceremony. By the time Oelschlager graduates this spring, she will have taken every course that Timura teaches and explained that many of her colleagues also come back for more of his classes—not just because of his knowledge but also because of his unwavering belief in his students.
“We always come back because Tim always believes that we can go higher,” she said.
In keeping with traditions surrounding endowed chair ceremonies, Timura marked his inauguration by giving a lecture. His talk, titled Why? Who? What? delved into his teaching philosophy and the people who inspired it. Citing philosophical influences such as John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and David Kolb, Timura explained that a combination of their teachings and his own experience led him to the core belief that education is a partnership between teacher and student. Though he appreciated being called an academic “rulebreaker” by Nulsen and Kogod dean David Marchick, he said that his departure from educational norms was born out of necessity. Standard curricula, he explained, often fails to take lived experience into account, and his focus on experiential learning takes students out into the world to understand why they need to know the things that they are learning.
