30 Years Ago: PEL Program in Gillette, Wyoming

Rick Erb's PEL classes were held in Gillette, Wyo.

Left: Today, Rick Erb '89, who earned a J.D. in 1993 from the University of Wyoming in Laramie, is an attorney with offices in Gillette and in Buffalo, Wyo. (Photo by Dana Romanoff Photography, of Boulder, Colo., and courtesy of Rick Erb)

by Anne W. Anderson

In the mid-1980s, Richard Allen "Rick" Erb. Jr. '89, J.D., didn't have many options when it came to higher education.

He had graduated in 1974 from Tongue River High School in Dayton, Wyo., a small town near the Wyoming-Montana border, and had spent a year at the University of Wyoming (UW) in Laramie before going to work as a coal miner in Gillette, Wyo.
 
"Dad said I needed to go to college, so I did," Erb said in a telephone interview. "But it was a pretty big disaster academically. I saw it wasn't that hard, but I just wasn't interested at the time."

"Dad" was Richard Allen "Dick" Erb Sr. '87 who worked as a landman or real estate manager for AMAX Coal Company, a subsidiary of AMAX, Inc. Rick's mom, Lois "Ann" Erb '87, worked for Cordero Coal Mine, a subsidiary of Sun Oil Company.

Gillette, circled in red, is about 300 miles north of Laramie, also circled in red

Over the years, Rick Erb had worked for various mining companies in the Powder River Basin, an area that today produces about 40% of the nation's coal. Erb had operated mining equipment, became a certified welder, was a blaster, and eventually became a production supervisor.

But in the mid-1980s, residents in the Gillette area could only earn a two-year degree through Gillette Community College.

"The University of Wyoming wasn’t interested in providing a distance program, and nobody wanted to quit their good-paying jobs with the mines to go to college in Laramie," Erb said. "So we were stuck with no options."

That was about to change.

PEL people thinking outside the obvious

A group of human resources directors from the different mining companies in the area got together and approached UW about the possibility of doing some kind of distance learning degree.

At the time, UW wasn't interested, according to Dana Cozad '69, who was teaching the PEL introductory and capstone courses, LLV and Judeo-Christian Perspectives (JCP, the forerunner to today's Quest for Meaning), and doing advising and student services work.

The HR group persisted, however.

"Somehow they found out about Eckerd," said Cozad, who became director of PEL in 1988. "They called to see if we had ever done anything like deliver a distance learning program that far away. One thing led to another, and their companies paid for me and Linda Blalock, then director of marketing for special programs, to come out there and talk about possibilities. They wanted their employees to get degrees."

The Gillette planning committee reserved one of the training rooms at the local hospital for a classroom, ran newspaper ads promoting the program, and recruited students.

Most students' tuition was paid for by their employers, so the only degree offered was a Concentration in Business Management. All three of the Erb family signed up, along with others -- enough for a class. 

Cozad flew to Gillette, then with a population of about 12,000 people, three times during the sixteen-week term to conduct an LLV course on Friday evening and all day Saturday. She remembers getting snowed in one weekend in September, a not unusual occurrence: The year before the program started, Gillette had experienced a more unusual killer blizzard . . . in April. 

Professor Peter Hammerschmidt today

Other professors -- including Naveen Malhotra, still Professor of Finance and International Business in PEL, and Peter Hammerschmidt, still a Professor of Economics and a senior faculty member of the Leadership Institute at Eckerd, and Joe Beerson, who taught marketing -- followed suit, flying out for two or three days of class sessions, including some Sunday morning courses, and then flying back on Sunday afternoon.

Malhotra remembered the Erbs well. "I am grateful to them for ferrying me around their town, for picking me up from the airport and dropping me back," Malhotra wrote in an email.

When the senior Erbs graduated, they flew down for the commencement ceremony and connected with Malhotra again.

"They were wonderful people," Malhotra wrote.

"A full-blown academic program with high standards"

Cozad said PEL committed to delivering nine courses in Gillette. Students committed to taking a one-week comprehensive exam at the St. Petersburg campus in Florida to meet the accreditation requirements.

"Most of the students in the Gillette program had a two-year degree and a lot of experiential credit, so the nine courses fulfilled most of what most students needed," Cozad explained.

Erb said the experiential credit option was an important incentive, but that the program was intellectually rigorous.

Dana Cozad '69 and Professor Naveen Malhotra
at a recent reunion. Photo by Donna Littell '75.

"It wasn’t a pushover in terms of academic requirements," Erb said.  "It was a full-blown academic program with high standards."

As with most PEL students today, most people in the Gillette group were working full time, many had children at home, and had other life challenges.

Cozad said the program was structured so most people could complete the nine courses -- LLV, JCP, and the core business management courses -- one three-month class at a time in the group sessions.

"We planned it pretty tightly," Cozad said. "But, as people graduated or dropped out, we no longer
had enough students to fly out a professor. So a few people finished by mail."

Erb was one of those students. "Mom and Dad were a married couple with no kids at home," Erb explained. "So they kept each other honest about getting the work done. It took me longer and, toward the end, I took a few classes as directed studies."

The senior Erbs graduated in 1987, and Rick Erb graduated, with honors, two years later.

 

After PEL, then what?

Dick and Ann Erb, both '87 PEL graduates

After retiring in 1991, Dick Erb Sr. went on to serve in the Wyoming State Legislature as both a State Representative and as a State Senator, serving on the Revenue Committee and other committees. He died in November 2016.

Ann Erb, who used the PEL program as a good reason to buy one of the early word processing personal computers -- "which beat the heck out of a typewriter," said Rick Erb -- went on to teach business and technical classes at the community college.

Rick Erb went back into mining but not for long. "I graduated and thought 'Well, I've proved it. That's done,'" Erb said. "But the mining industry was changing as the oil companies moved in and brought their own employees with them."

Erb applied to law school at the University of Wyoming, was accepted in the fall of 1990, and moved to Laramie for three years.

After graduating in 1993, Erb served as the Johnson County and Prosecuting Attorney in Buffalo, Wyo., then moved back to Gillette, where he established his private practice.

Cozad said she was pleased to learn the Erbs ended up where they did, and said being part of the PEL program overall has been so rewarding.

"People have done amazing things because of PEL," Cozad said. "And, for many people, it was amazing for them to think they could go back and earn a bachelor’s degree."

Nor did the Gillette PEL influence end in Wyoming. Hammerschmidt said at least two of the Gillette students went on to do summer courses with him and a group of residential students in London. And Cozad said at least one child of a Gillette PEL student attended Eckerd College as a residential student.

For Erb, who also is a local musician, the PEL experience changed the direction of his life. Was it worth it?

Erb was honest. "Coal miners I worked with back then are retiring with fat 401Ks," Erb said, "whereas I'm on my own. But from a personal perspective, this was an enormous blessing. I probably would not have quit my job to go get a degree, much less have gone on to law school."

Article modified 03/30/17: An earlier picture of Naveen Malhotra was replaced with the picture of Dana Cozand and Naveen Malhotra, and style edits were made.

Anne W. Anderson is PEL's director of blended and online learning 

and is co-editor of The PEL Connector.