The first time Bert Moore stepped onto UTD’s campus the Student Union was being built, SUAAB was founded and 282 students received bachelor’s degrees.
Since then, this Behavioral and Brain Sciences, or BBS, dean has helped to found four new centers that are located throughout Dal- las and this past spring he witnessed the graduation of 1,165 undergraduate students.
While Moore has been the act- ing dean at UTD for 23 years, it isn’t the way he originally thought his life would pan out.
“Oddly, I had always wanted to be a university professor,” Moore said. “My best friend growing up had a father who was a geology professor… He used to take field trips in the summer to Utah and
Nevada with his graduate students to go look at rocks, and I thought ‘how cool,’ so I decided I wanted to be a professor.”
Originally, Moore planned on being a history professor, but his plans changed when he had an inspirational psychology professor his sophomore year at Southern Methodist University. After that, Moore’s academic life went according to plan.
He graduated from SMU in 1966, received his master’s in clinical psychology from the University of Chicago in Illinois and his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1973. After teaching at a couple of other colleges, Moore came to UTD as a research psychologist in 1980. One thing led to another, and Moore eventually ended up with the decision of whether or nor to accept to position of associate dean.
The path he chose soon led him to the role of BBS dean. “You fall into it,” Moore said. “I don’t think anybody starts out saying ‘I want to be a dean.’”
Regardless of how he originally felt about taking the role, Moore was cut out for the many facets of dean ship. In his original role of researcher and professor, Moore was limited to working on a few things at one time, so he could focus all his energy.
Through this time Moore mostly studied the ways emotions impact peoples’ responses and, his dissertation topic, the delay of gratification in children.
Although a researcher takes this route, Moore said he was always interested in doing more. One of the great things about being the dean, he said, is the amount of exposure he is able to have in all the differ- ent aspects of his school.
The work of the school, he said, covers the way syn- apses fire to how people with stroke require language to the influence emotions, bullying — the list goes on and with it so does Moore’s excitement.
“It’s hard for me to con- jure up anything I would have rather done. There are days when you think, do I really want to be a dean and deal with these problems and handle budget issues, student problems, recourse facilities (lack of ) space and sometimes people aren’t happy,” Moore said. “I’m somebody who likes people to be happy. But I’ve been dean considerably longer than any other dean, so I’ve seen incredible transitions in this university and to be a small part of that is a fascinating thing.”
Even though Moore made the decision to move to the more administrative side, he continues to teach an internship class, which he founded in the late 1980s, every se- mester as well as the occasional graduate level course and this fall the freshman required UNIV 1010.
For the UNIV 1010 course Moore went back to his academic roots this October when he taught a seminar about the ways emotion affects peoples’ decisions. Five hundred students signed up.
Of the many things Moore has encountered in his more than 30 years at UTD, he said the most rewarding thing is seeing his students graduate.
“I never exactly want to go to commencement, because I have a life outside of here, but every time I’m here — I love it,” Moore said. “You get to shake those hands and give those degrees out often to people who have traveled around the world or people who are the first in their family to get a degree. That’s a terrific privilege.”
