Chris Thomas

Professor

“Students who have the motivation to learn can do no better than coming to SMC.”

Chris Thomas admits to a thorough devotion to golf, a sport where he says, “I’ve become pretty obsessive with it. I guess I’ve got a handicap of 6 or 7.” But there’s another area where this Michigan native admits to obsession. And that’s the academic excellence that he’s witnessed—and become a part of at SMC—since joining the faculty in 1960.

“We do so many things well as an institution,” says Thomas. “Our counseling and support services are excellent. And our library and the Learning Resource Center have both grown enormously in recent years. It’s hard to pinpoint what it is we do best as a college,” he continues. “But I think the open exchange of ideas between faculty members has kept us consistently right at the top over the years.”

In Chris’ political science classes he feels that he’s teaching some of the basic truths of what it is to be human. “Basically, the essence of studying political science is finding out what makes a political system possible, what makes it durable and what makes it collapse. It’s the study of how human beings organize themselves collectively. And in that sense, it deals with the fundamental issues of the human community.”

Chris says that “respect for students and giving them the best possible lecture in the classroom are the most important things for teachers to keep in mind. And those are things we do uniformly well at SMC.”

Back