Ray Jones wins “Best Professor” for the eighth time since 2001

Ray Jones sits at his computer, piles of neatly-stacked papers decorating his desk, Pitt helmets and basketballs covering the window sill and the floor.  

Jones has been voted Best Professor for the third consecutive time and eighth time overall since 2001, which was also his first year as a faculty member. When asked about it, he just shrugs. He’s humble that way.

“I don’t know how I keep winning this thing,” he says, laughing.

Jones has been a faculty professor at Katz School of Business and the College of Business Administration since 2001, but began teaching business classes several years prior as a graduate student. His main two courses are both required business classes: Managerial Ethics, about ethics in business and leadership, and Organizational Behavior, about motivational tactics in a work environment.

Dante DiPietro, a senior finance and marketing student at Pitt, took Jones’ ethics course as a junior.

DiPietro said he had relatively low expectations for a subject like ethics — not known to be the most exciting class. Jones’ high energy surpassed those expectations from the first day of class.

“He had turned the class material into an actually interesting and thought provoking conversation,” DiPietro said. “He spun ethics into some sort of modern, social business philosophy.”

Throughout his lectures, DiPietro said, Jones would emphasize topics by slapping the table or hitting his chest with exuberance. His high energy and fast tempo made the subject matter shockingly fun, and his care for the material shone through easily.

But Jones’ classes sometimes get more exciting than just the course material. Jones recalled one time when a student decided to pull a prank on him. The student, dressed as Spider-Man, barrelled into the classroom and toward Jones, who was standing at the front of the room lecturing.

“When Spider-Man was charging toward me I was actually going to lower my shoulder and hit Spider-Man because I thought he was going to take me out,” Jones said. “He charged me and he stopped, waited for a second, turned around and ran out of the room. All I did was make a quick reference to it and move on.”

On typical days — when superheroes aren’t rushing him during class — Jones’ goal with teaching is to for students to learn the material deeply enough that they can apply what they’ve seen in the classroom to what they’ll see in their future working lives. He wants his students to be able to deal more readily with uncertainty and ambiguity and apply that in positions of leadership.

Arjang Assad — the Henry E. Haller Jr. dean at Katz and CBA — said Jones’ accessibility to students allows him to get them interested in business classes they otherwise wouldn’t care about.

“It’s hard to reach people outside of their specialty, and that’s a gift of his,” Assad said.

Assad said his style of teaching — relating class material to students’ lives — facilitates their learning in ways a textbook alone couldn’t do. Jones does this by bringing in relevant stories from business or pop culture and giving assignments that require students to find examples in their own lives.

“He brings in so many real business examples that students have a head start when they reach the real world,” Assad said, “Students know that’s a big contribution to them.”

One thing that sets Jones apart is his attendance roster — instead of passing around sign-in sheets, he has each student answer a question. Questions are handwritten and passed in, and each class he reads the most amusing submissions from the previous class. The first 15 minutes are devoted to this exercise, which helps pique the students’ interests, especially in a large lecture.

Jones’ questions are hardly limited to one subject. An upcoming subject sat on his desk Wednesday afternoon: Aaron or Jordan Rodgers, who is preferred and why? But one of his favorites was the result of a schedule conflict.

“I asked people just for fun, should we skip class or make it up, and everyone wrote ‘skip,’” Jones said. “But one kid wrote ‘I don’t know who this Skip is, but I don’t want to have class.’ That’s the kind of answer that gets read in class.”

Jones became interested in teaching after coaching youth basketball, which he’s been doing since his days at North Catholic High School in the Pittsburgh region. When his father recognized Jones’ love of coaching, he recommended that Jones pursue teaching.

“I always give my dad credit,” Jones said. “He told me I should become a teacher and I was like, ‘Absolutely not.'”

Reluctant to follow his father’s advice, Jones majored in history and political science as an undergraduate at Purdue before getting his master’s at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs in public administration and a Ph.D. in business environment ethics through Pitt. His initial intention was to go to D.C. and work in the government.

When he got the opportunity to teach as a graduate student, he seized it.

“Because I was so into it, they gave me my own classes,” Jones said. “I’ve been teaching those since grad school.”

Jones said, as a professor, he knows he is just one small part of his students’ transformative experience in college — something that he often reminds himself.

“I teach six out of a required 120 credits,” Jones said. “I have to understand I’m not central to it but I’m still a part of the college experience.”