A Career of Showing Up

How Dr. Robert Wallace Shaped the McMurry Experience

Dr. Robert Wallace arrived at McMurry in the spring of 1990. He and his wife, Dr. Rosemary Wallace, had recently completed their doctorates at Columbia University and were living in New York City. At the time, McMurry’s sociology department was in urgent need of rehabilitation. The regional accrediting agency had required the university to hire a sociologist with a terminal degree, and the position came bundled with department chair responsibilities. When then-President Dr. Thomas Kim extended the offer, Wallace accepted. Privately, he expected to stay no more than three years.

He stayed for 36.

He stayed, initially, because he found an intellectually vibrant community among the faculty, colleagues like Bob Monk, Joe Stamey, Sandra Harper, and Robert Sledge, whose academic rigor matched his own. Monk and Stamey were particularly meaningful: both had grown up in Texas, earned PhDs from northeastern universities, and carried the same intellectual range Wallace had cultivated at Columbia. He recognized in them a version of himself, and in McMurry a place that could hold that kind of ambition.

But the deeper reason was the students.

Teaching sociology at a small university requires a particular kind of entrepreneurship. Students rarely arrive having heard of the discipline. They come with ministerial aspirations, looking for a wider lens on society. They come wanting to work in social services. Some find a home in sociology after struggling through accounting or biochemistry. And increasingly, over the last two decades, they come drawn to criminology, driven by crime dramas and a desire to understand the world that produces them.

Regardless of how students found their way to his classroom, Dr. Wallace made it his mission to meet them exactly where they were and then to show them somewhere further.

“He possessed a rare, remarkable balance as an educator,” said Dr. Greeley Myers, a member of the class of 1993, a group Wallace frequently and affectionately cites as his best. “An incredible, deeply compassionate personal nature paired with a commitment to keeping his students academically accountable. From the very beginning, it was clear that Dr. Wallace cared about the person first. As a student, you felt genuinely heard and valued. Because I knew he cared so deeply about my well-being, I never wanted to let him down.”

Myers went on to earn his doctorate and now serves as associate vice president of alumni relations and annual giving at Shenandoah University in Virginia. He credits the discipline and standards Wallace held him to as foundational to everything that followed.

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McMurry’s student body spans a wide spectrum of academic preparedness, including a significant number of first-generation college students, a population Wallace understood from the inside.

His experience gave him a particular sensitivity to aspirations of students who were bright but had never been recognized as such or challenged to realize their potential.

“I could take a student who was maybe the quietest person in the room,” he said. “I could read their work and go, ‘Whoa. Do you know how smart you are?’ A light bulb would go off. They may have known it internally, but then you get a professor telling you what you could be. That long climb, that journey, taking a student from where they start and helping them build all the way through, that is the most satisfying part of the job.”

When Jeff Scott ‘97 arrived at McMurry in 1993, Dr. Wallace quickly recognized his potential.

Scott, now director of the Servant Leadership and First Year Experience programs at McMurry, returned to Abilene after nearly two decades away, in part, to be near the McMurry professor who shaped him.

“I am reminded each time I pass by his newly occupied house and now-vacant office, never to take all that he has given to me for granted,” Scott said.

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Dr. Jori Sechrist, graduated from McMurry in 2001 and now serves as associate vice president of academic affairs and professor of sociology at McMurry. She describes the same quality in Wallace that Myers and Scott do, the sense of truly being seen.

Her standout memory is a moment in Old Main after an introductory sociology class. She told Dr. Wallace she wanted to become a sociology professor. He stopped in the middle of the hallway, smiled broadly, and immediately began laying out her next steps at McMurry and beyond.

“He invested in me and my family,” she added. “He and Rosemary became another set of grandparents to my kids, celebrated my accomplishments, and mourned with me and my family when my dad died, setting up a new award in our department with the memorial gifts we received, the Lawrence B. Coll outstanding first-year sociologist award.”

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Dr. Wallace’s investment in students was never confined to office hours or classrooms. He made it a point to show up at theater productions, art exhibits, and athletic events across campus. He understood that for many students, the simple act of a professor cheering from the stands communicated something words could not.

Inside the classroom, Dr. Wallace made sociology tangible. Christina Martinez ‘19 recalls him using car advertisements to explain social stratification, basketball to illustrate human interconnectedness and the way environment shapes how people play the game of life.

Martinez was also invited to attend an Interfaith Progressive Dinner at the Wallaces’ home, where she listened to her professor talk passionately about the same sport he had used to teach her about a sociological concept.

Today, Martinez works as a grant writer for a civil rights organization, a career path directly influenced by a civil rights course she took with him. “He gave me language for ideas I had felt but couldn’t name,” she says. “He opened fields I never knew I could enter.”

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During his career, Wallace watched McMurry evolve. He saw the student body become more diverse, celebrated the university’s designation as a Hispanic-Serving Institution, and watched undergraduate research become one of McMurry’s defining strengths.

He also learned from his students.

His final honors student, Anyah Campbell ‘26 introduced him to a body of literature on prosecutorial types he had never encountered, proving that the learning in a mentoring relationship never runs in only one direction.

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In 1993, Dr. Wallace’s late mother-in-law made a prescient remark.

“Rob,” she told him, “You and McMurry were made for each other.”

Looking back, it is difficult to argue otherwise. He arrived to rebuild a department and ended up building a culture of mentorship that has rippled outward through generations of graduates.

At his retirement celebration, a former student, Joaquin Rueda ’95, who had driven seven hours from Houston just to be there, spent the afternoon reconnecting with the professor who had changed his life. Rueda arrived at McMurry as a first-generation student from El Paso. Dr. Wallace’s Intro to Sociology class sparked an interest that eventually led to a career with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That is the kind of accounting that matters to Dr. Wallace. Not the awards, the publications, or the committee appointments, though there were plenty of these. What matters is the student who arrived uncertain and left transformed. The student who stayed in college because one class became a community. The student who found in the Wallaces a surrogate family. The students turned colleagues who, years later, walk past his old office door and feel the weight of what was given.

The McMurry Difference

Alumni and students consistently point to personal relationships with professors as what makes McMurry special. For 36 years, Dr. Robert Wallace has exemplified that culture. Here are just a handful of the students whose lives he’s impacted.