From IT to Economics: Professor Paul Bennett
Photo provided by Rampage student photographer Elei Haynes.
Dr. Paul Bennett isn’t much into sports, but among the few events he watches is the America’s Cup, one of the oldest international sports competitions in the world. It began with a race around the Isle of Wight in 1851.
“A whole fleet of British boats contributed,” Dr. Bennett said. “One boat came from America — that was the yacht ‘America’ — and it sailed across the Atlantic in order to compete. It won by about half a mile.”
Dr. Bennett has loved sailing since he was a boy. He says it “gets into your blood — you can’t forget it.” Hanging on his office wall is a painting of the boat he had when he was 18. Although he now serves as assistant professor of economics at Bluefield University, Dr. Bennett spent most of his career in information technology (IT).
As an undergraduate, Dr. Bennett majored in mathematics, which he sees as an “incredibly beautiful” part of God’s creation. He interned with IBM, where he worked on a program to design cuts for a numerically controlled glaze. He loved it so much that he spent the next 40 years in IT.
“I tell my students that I have two careers: one in IT writing programs and one as an economics professor, and I would do both of them, even if I wasn’t paid,” Dr. Bennett said.
For most of his IT career, Dr. Bennett worked for SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.
“When Russia invaded Ukraine, one of the first sanctions they put on Russia was to disconnect it from SWIFT, so they couldn’t do international financial transactions,” Dr. Bennett said.
Originally from England, Dr. Bennett met his wife while in the United States developing SWIFT software. They lived in Belgium (where SWIFT is headquartered) before returning to the United States to help with a new operating center. After SWIFT appeared in an article about top terrorist targets in the United States, the company decided to keep its location secret.
“So after that, we said we’re not going to tell anybody where we are,” Dr. Bennett said. “We put tank traps around our building and kept vehicles more than 50 yards from the building in case somebody tried to blow us up. So that’s why I’m not allowed to tell you where it is.”
After more than 20 years at SWIFT, he read a 1999 article in The Economist magazine that piqued his interest. He enrolled in economics classes at George Mason University for personal enrichment.
“I was having so much fun I decided to look for the next [class],” Dr. Bennett said. “I went on the website where I usually register for classes and tried to register for these classes. And it said, you cannot register for these classes because you’re not in the [doctoral] program.”
So, he applied to the PhD program. Eleven years later, Dr. Bennett earned his doctorate. By that time, he was 69 years old and had retired from SWIFT.
“My wife said to me, ‘Well, what are you going to do now?’ I said, ‘What do you mean? I’m retired. What do you expect me to do?’”
He started applying for jobs in higher education and came across an ad for a position at Bluefield University, then college. As a devout believer, the school’s Christian mission appealed to him. He says his faith is “the lens through which I see everything.”
“Sometimes that lens doesn’t seem to produce a very different result from logic,” Dr. Bennett said. “But if my logic comes up with a solution, an answer which is immoral from my perspective, I will try and come up with a different one.”
This year, Dr. Bennett celebrated 10 years as a BU faculty member. Although he loves his job, teaching students who have no interest in economics is a challenge. He’s not sure there is an answer to that perennial problem. But he also has students who really love economics.
“Every so often you get to teach somebody something you love and see them enjoying it and learning to love it,” Dr. Bennett said.
In his first semester of teaching, a student came up to him after class and said he was transferring to another school so he could major in economics. He wasn’t the only one.
“I said, ‘oh, great.’ And what do you do? There’s no economics major here,” Dr. Bennett said. “Dr. Cline is open to creating one, but I’m not at all sure we’d have enough students interested in it to make it worthwhile.” Next semester, Dr. Bennett will teach BU’s first doctoral-level economics course.
Dr. Bennett hasn’t done any sailing recently, but he has been skiing most years since he was 16 and plans to hit the slopes again this winter. He has sung in the chorus for “The Pirates of Penzance” and “Oklahoma!,” both plays in which his wife was the leading lady. He also plays chess.
According to Werner Lind, co-director of BU’s Easley Library, Dr. Bennett is a good chess player and “an asset to the university.” Lind noted that when he called on faculty members to designate outdated books in their subject area, Dr. Bennett responded promptly.
“Not all of the faculty responded promptly to that, or at all,” Lind said. “He went through very diligently and got rid of a lot of stuff that we didn’t need . . . He strikes me as the kind of person that will do what needs to be done, and he’ll do it promptly and conscientiously.”