Janelle Coleman (later Ashley) entered SFA in the summer of 1959, at the beginning of the Steen years. She actually commuted to Nacogdoches from Lufkin with her friend Tommye Jan Wilson (later Lowery.) Tommye Jan at the time was a young teacher in Lufkin High School and had just begun to work on her master’s degree in the history department. Both Janelle and Tommye Jan were to enter the faculty at SFA during the boom years of the mid-1960s under Dr. Steen. As SFA students who became SFA professors, as they revealed in recent interviews, they both have unique perspectives on the events of those years.

Janelle worked in the office of news and information as a student. “I can remember dealing with news releases pushing for two thousand students in 1960. We thought that was really big then.” By the time Janelle completed her undergraduate in business in May of 1962, the change was already being noticed. “In the fall of 1962, when I started my Master’s degree in English, the baby boom was already in the high school. It was amazing. I took a job at Nacogdoches High School while I worked on my degree.” At the time, since her undergraduate degree was in business, Janelle taught business communications As the enrollment at the college began to explode, she asked Frank Lauterdale, head of the business department, if she could move into teaching at the college.

“He told me,” she recounted, “I would have to be working on a terminal degree before he would hire me even on a temporary basis. So I immediately enrolled in summer school at North Texas in the fields of finance and management. Later, when I received my doctorate, I was the first woman to receive a doctorate from their school of business.” She worked on her degree for several summers and then lived in Denton for fifteen months in 1968-69.

Janelle Ashley (she and Ray were married in 1962) began teaching at SFA in the fall of 1965. The baby boom had hit. “We had wall to wall students,” she remembered. “The classrooms were crowded. They were not large like we have today–200 students in some instances–but they were very large for the classroom we had. The old spaces were not built to handle such class sizes. The 7 AM classes, which we had had in the summer terms, now came into the fall semester. As a junior faculty member, I got classes at 7 AM five days a week.” She admitted that this was hard. “Everyone shared offices and taught at odd times, long into the evenings; we just did not have enough classroom space.”

She taught business communication and typing classes in the Rusk and Austin buildings, just as countless other teachers had done since 1926. When asked if she found it to be a disadvantage as a former student making a transition into the faculty, she did not hesitate to say. “Not really. I always thought it was an asset. I knew the culture and the atmosphere of the institution. I knew why certain things were as they were. I felt I understood SFA.”

When she returned from her residency in Denton, she observed, “the campus had exploded. Buildings were springing up everywhere.” While the university had reorganized into schools, there still was no business school: “Frank Lauderdale had not completed his Ph.D. We were still under the school of Liberal Arts with Dean Ted Kallsen. After Frank finished his doctoral program at UT, then the college of business was officially created. We were still in the Rusk Building, however.” She continued to teach some business communications, but she also began to teach human resources, policy, and management–her fields in graduate school.

Asked about the atmosphere on campus at the time, she replied: “It is almost a void for me. I was teaching full time, trying to finish my dissertation. I had a child in elementary school, too. I must have pushed other things to the side.” She did vividly remember the statistics being quoted about the new Miller Science building: “It contained in that one building as much as 2/3 of what we had in the entire campus before that time.” Even when they got new buildings, she continued, “The very large buildings, as education and business, filled up immediately when we moved in. Enrollment was still growing. We were adding new faculty right and left.” She observed, in an aside, “we have had a very stable faculty since that time at SFA; we are now seeing the retirements in large numbers.”

“I hate to think about trying to cope with the crush of students which faced the Steen administration. When you think of the way the university is funded, you don’t have the formula funding advantage of the growth until the biennium following the growth itself. You are always behind in the hiring of the faculty you need. Then too, SFA was in competition with every other school for human resources.”

By 1972, the school of business was “bursting at seams;” she said. “We saw a 40% increase in students over five year time period. I entered the university in large part because of this boom.” When asked if she was ever treated in a condescending way because she had been a former students, she answered quickly, “No. People like Carolyn Price were wonderful mentors for me as a student and wonderful to me as a young faculty member. She encouraged me to complete my doctorate. She and Frank Lauderdale encouraged me.” She did, however, concede that others had not found it to be that way.

She said she thought of Dr. Steen as the “politician president, the one who would go to Austin and bring back the resources we needed to cope with the growth.” He insisted on high standards: “He encouraged everyone to hire the best; he did not cut corners.” She thought Steen was quite student-friendly. He would walk around the campus and talk with students. He knew many of them by name. You felt very much, even with the growth, that SFA still had a family-like atmosphere. Steen’s door was always open. I felt that even as a faculty member. I still feel SFA has this kind of familiar atmosphere. It is one of our strong points.”

Dr. Ashley became the second Dean of the School of Business in 1981 and in 1992 became Vice President for Academic Affairs at SFA. (1998)