William M. Jordan
Dr. William Jordan is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Louisiana Tech University. He is currently serving as Mechanical Engineering Program Chair.
A native of Denver, Colorado, he has been at Louisiana Tech University since 1985. He teaches materials engineering courses. He has research interests in the mechanical behavior of composite materials as well as engineering ethics. He also has done work with engineering education reform.
In addition to his academic work, he has worked as a metallurgical engineer for a medium sized steel company in Ohio. It was in Ohio that he met and married his wife Gail. They have two sons.
Dr. Jordan grew up in Denver, Colorado. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Metallurgical Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. While at Mines his view of the world changed greatly when he became a Christian. To learn more about his faith, he went to Denver Seminary and received an M.A. degree there. He spent the summer of 1976 in Manila, Philippines on a short term missionary project. He then worked for five years as a Metallurgical Engineer at a medium sized steel mill in Mansfield, Ohio. He was involved with quality control, customer contact, and developing of new grades of steel. In the summer of 1982 he got married and moved to Bryan, Texas. He obtained a Ph.D. degree from Texas A & M University in Mechanics and Materials in 1985. He is a registered Metallurgical Engineer in the state of Louisiana. He is married to the former Gail Forbes of Bellville, Ohio, and has two sons. He is actively involved in Christ Community Church, where he serves on the missions team.
In 1985 he moved to Ruston, Louisiana, where he has taught in the Mechanical Engineering program. He became a full Professor in fall 2001. Effective June 2000 he became the Mechanical Engineering Program Chair. He teaches materials related classes in the college. He has research interests in the area of material failure (particularly composite materials). He has done work in engineering ethics and instructional innovation. He has received over $710,000 in research grants. He has more than 60 publications/presentations in his research area.
He has been actively involved with student groups while at Louisiana Tech University. He was the faculty advisor to the student chapter of A.S.M.E. for 8 years (1986-1994). He has been the faculty advisor to Campus Crusade for Christ since 1986.
I grew up in the mile high city of Denver, Colorado, the second son of a Denver police officer. Church attendance was very sporadic in our home. My father and mother came from different Christian traditions and they compromised by not going to any church. I cannot remember seeing my father in a church building for anything other than a wedding or a funeral. My mother took my brother and me to Sunday School and then to church for a number of years. By the time I reached my early teens, we had stopped going to church at all. My parents behaved as if the Christian moral teachings were true, but they rarely talked about God.
As long as I can remember, I have had interests and abilities in science. As a result of this, I took advanced placement math, chemistry, and physics while in high school. I found school relatively easy, and got good grades. [I graduated in the top 15 in a class of over 700.] Even some of my hobbies had a scientific flavor to them. One of my favorite clubs was chess club. We had meetings every Friday afternoon after school was over. [This also might say something about my group's lack of dating very much as well.]
Not all of my interests were in the sciences. I was a spectator sports “nut”, following baseball and football with great enthusiasn. I was a fanatical supporter of the Denver Broncos. [This was in the era when they had never yet had a winning season.] I enjoyed political activities and was president of our school’s Young Democrats club my senior year. I spent many hours during the summer and fall of 1968 trying to make Hubert Humphrey President of the United States.
All in all, I thought that I had a good life. It didn’t seem to me as if I needed God. I thought that science had shown us God was not needed to understand what is going on in the world. With this kind of attitude, I went away to college in the fall of 1969. At college I found that I could still get good grades. I also continued my political involvement.
Yet for some reason, I was not happy. I was able to fulfill my goals, but they no longer satisfied me. I then met some other students who were different. They enjoyed life and had a purpose for life that I desperately wanted, but did not have. When asked, they told me that their real joy and purpose in life came from a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I found this statement to be unbelievalbe, for I was confident that science had shown us we did not need God.
However, their happiness, contrasted with my growing unhappiness, continued to bother me. I could not reject their faith as the choice of uneducated people, for many of them were getting the same high grades I was. Even more amazing, their leader was an engineering faculty member. That obviously intelligent people would believe this story forced me to re-evaluate my position. I thought the thing I should do would be to read the gospels for myself. I went home the next weekend, and secretly brought back to campus my old Bible that had been given to me by my grandmother when I was in grade school. I did this reading secretly, for I did not want any of my friends to know that I was actually reading the Bible.
The more I read, the more Jesus impressed me. I even went to one evangelistic meeting sponsored by Campus Crusade to hear more. I became convinced that Jesus was truly a remarkable person. I still had problems with what I called the “God stuff” that referred to Jesus as more than just a man. I thought Jesus was a remarkable person, but still just a man. I thought the “God stuff” had been added later by his followers to make him look even better than he was.
With this attitude, I got invited to go to a state wide retreat for Campus Crusade for Chirst that was to be on the University of Colorado campus. The speaker the opening night spoke about the existence of God as shown by the lives of the early disciples. He pointed out that the early disciples had every human reason to deny that Jesus was God, yet they did just the opposite and insisted he was (and is) God. This cost many of them their lives.
During and after that meeting, I thought and thought about this point. Why would the disciples make up stuff that said Jesus was God, knowing that this would result in their own punishment? I could only conclude that the reason they said these things was because what they said was true. They believed that Jesus really was God, and they had to say that even if it resulted in future punishment. That Friday night, October 8, 1971, I lay in a sleeping bag in a church fellowship hall in Boulder, Colorado and tried to think this through. I finally had to conclude that the disicples were telling the truth. Jesus is God. This truth that had changed their life, could also change mine. So, as I lay there in the sleeping bag in the darkened room, I asked Jesus to become my Savior, to forgive my sins, and come into my life. This produced an inward happiness that I had never had before. I finally learned what love was all about. It’s like the apostle John wrote so long ago (I John 4:18-19): ”There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. We love because he first loved us.”
The next morning, we were to break up into teams to go sharing our faith in the Colorado dormitories. I innocently asked: ”What is witnessing?” One of the staff members then decided to become my partner for the morning. Since my question indicated that I knew very little about this, he first made sure that I had already made a personal decision for Christ. I then went with him, and watched as he shared his faith in the dormitory. All in all, it was quite a weekend for this junior college student.