Tech History:
Dr. Phil Adler: A Legacy of Respect
Summer 2017 | by Melissa Fralick
Many Yellow Jackets swore at legendary management professor Phil Adler during his 38 years of teaching at the Institute, but today most of his former students just swear by him.
Philip Adler Jr. (Honorary Alumnus 1992) is a stickler for precision. The longtime Georgia Tech professor spent many hours drilling his management students about the importance of understanding words commonly used in business—even seemingly ubiquitous ones like “strategic” or “time.”
Take, for instance, his examination of the word “respect.”
“What does it mean when you say you respect someone—you think highly of them?” Adler asks. “Are you going to hear a sailor say ‘I look up to the ocean?’ No. But you will hear a sailor say, ‘I respect the ocean.’ What respect means is that you realize something or someone will have an impact on your life. Therefore, you can have positive and negative respect.”
It is perhaps this closer inspection of the term respect that best describes Adler’s relationship to the hundreds of students he taught throughout his nearly 40-year tenure at Georgia Tech.
Known for his high-stakes, no-nonsense teaching style, Adler is the first to admit that he was both feared and beloved by students.
“They used to say, ‘we would swear at him in class, but now we swear by him’,” Adler says.
A recent survey conducted by the Georgia Tech Alumni Association asked alumni to name the person who impacted them the most during their time at Georgia Tech.
The results were presented visually in a word cloud, with the names mentioned the most featured most prominently in the largest font. Adler was, by far, the biggest name in the cloud—bigger than some of the biggest titans of Tech lore, such as Bobby Dodd and George Griffin.
So how is it that a single management professor could loom so large in the psyches of so many Georgia Tech alumni?
His former students—including prominent business executives, clergy, professors, entertainers and professional athletes— say it’s because he taught them how to think fast, stay focused and challenge themselves.
THE ACCIDENTAL COLLEGE PROFESSOR
Adler is a jack of all trades. In addition to the decades he spent teaching at Georgia Tech, he spent 31 years in the U.S. Air Force (two in active duty during the Korean War), and retired from the reserves as a colonel.
He also worked for Westinghouse, the Department of Defense and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He worked for Jimmy Carter, during his terms as both governor of Georgia and president of the United States. He was even a big band singer and a radio personality, including a gig as a staff announcer on the radio station WGST. His resume goes on and on.
But what he didn’t set out to do was become a professor. “I wound up as a college professor simply because I had the opportunity to go for a master’s degree,” Adler says. “I went down to the University of Miami and they gave me a couple courses to teach as part of my fellowship, and it got me involved in teaching.”
After earning his MBA in 1957, Adler taught at the University of Miami for five years and conducted research for the Orange Bowl Festival before returning to Ohio State University, where he’d been an undergraduate, to work toward a doctoral degree in industrial management.
While still working on his PhD dissertation, Adler accepted the position of assistant professor at Georgia Tech in 1962.
Adler found that his range of positions—from the military, to industry to entertainment—was a boon to his teaching career. His philosophy is that no two situations will ever be exactly the same. By sharing his own life experiences, he could help his management students prepare for what they might encounter in their own professional lives.
In his trademark baritone, Adler explains:
“I developed a teaching method based on my Socratic experience and this was the key to it: I would give them my experiences, and they would have those. But then I taught them what to do with them. That would become their knowledge base. The more of my stuff they knew, the more pieces they would have to compare to their new situations,” Adler says. “It was my whole thesis of decision making. The more pieces they have of previous experience from me, and other professors, and life in general, the better.”
Rather than lecturing, Adler taught his students in the Socratic Method, using questions to guide students to the answers.
It wasn’t for everyone. His reputation caused fear in the hearts of many Tech students, but among those who liked his teaching style were true devotees, such as Georgia Tech Director of Athletics Todd Stansbury, IM 84, who took seven of Adler’s courses as a student.
Stansbury recalls the adrenaline rush of “being on the edge of disaster” all the time.
“There was no textbook, so if you missed something you were in big trouble,” Stansbury says. “You had to be listening, taking notes, and have your hand up at all times. You couldn’t just read a textbook and memorize concepts. You had to actually understand them. That’s what made his teaching style so different than what we had experienced in other classes.”
Adler’s students had to be paying attention and ready to be put on the spot at any moment. And once called upon, they needed to answer immediately.
“A basic thing my students learned from me was how to behave, think and reach positions of decision in microseconds,” Adler says.
If they were too slow, Adler’s students were likely to hear one of his regular refrains—“You’re not with me!”—before receiving an extra assignment. These punitive papers could be three pages or 30, depending on Adler’s mood. But he rarely gave quizzes, and often gave just one exam during a course.
“They were already getting an exam every minute of every day,” Adler says.
Vicki Davis, Mgt 91, says being in Adler’s classes was a transformative experience. “He put so much pressure on you that when you got through, you knew you could make it,” Davis says. “He taught me how to think and I’m forever grateful.”
Today, Davis is a high school teacher as well as a popular education blogger and podcaster, with a Twitter following of more than 143,000.
Davis says she is able to apply many of the concepts she learned from Adler—from how the brain absorbs new information to how scientists and engineers think—to her work as an educator.
“I still have my notes and it’s been over 25 years. I still use what I learned. How many classes, and how many professors, do you still remember what they said?” Davis asks. “There is no other Dr. Adler. He is in a class by himself.”
Stansbury recalls another one of Adler’s famous phrases: “People, people, I’m not teaching you for a test, I’m teaching you for the rest of your life.”
He said the principles he learned in Adler’s classes, have in fact, come in handy throughout his life.
“Being able to think on your feet, make split decisions, being under pressure in a meeting setting and being able to deliver has been helpful in our careers,” Stansbury says.
Adler was known as a demanding professor, but he also had a reputation for being available to his students 24/7. He gave them his phone number and permission to call whenever they needed help.
“They could call me at any hour,” Adler says. “They would call me at 3, 4 in the morning and I would tutor them. I was well known for it. They could talk to me anytime and I was happy to do it because that way I knew that they were better prepared. It made my job teaching easier.”
A LASTING LEGACY
In five decades, Adler witnessed many changes and took part in many “firsts” for the Institute.
Adler was the first professor to be jointly appointed at Emory University, as a clinical associate professor of rehabilitation medicine, opening the door for the now-extensive partnership between the two universities. He was also the first to teach a course by telephone, a concept that would develop into distance learning at Georgia Tech.
Throughout his tenure, Adler was keenly interested in Yellow Jacket athletics. He was actively involved in recruiting student-athletes and served on the board of the Georgia Tech Athletic Association. In addition to mentoring and teaching a lot of athletes in both men's and women's sports, Adler worked closely over the years with coaches like Bill Curry, Bobby Dodd and Bobby Cremins. “A lot of them went pro, especially my basketball and football students,” Adler says.
Adler was also behind a few key changes to Bobby Dodd Stadium over the years. He was instrumental in creating the stadium’s VIP boxes and lead the move to relocate the marching band from the east stands to the north stands, where they could be heard better.
After retiring from teaching in 2000, Adler remained active at Tech for more than another decade. His presence can still be felt throughout campus.
In 2005, a group of former students and friends raised money to name a wing of the fourth floor in the Scheller College of Business in honor of Adler. An anonymous donor endowed the Philip Adler Jr. Dean’s Scholarship in his name, which funds top Scheller students in perpetuity.
Stansbury says when meeting with alumni, regardless of when they attended Georgia Tech, the topic of Dr. Adler almost always comes up.
“I don’t know that you’re going to find many people that have the breadth of legacy that he has,” Stansbury says. “When you look at graduates of Georgia Tech that have gone through his classes, there’s an incredible amount of success and everyone of us who went through his classes would give credit where credit is due.”
At 86, Adler retains the sharp memory he’s always been known for, with the ability to recall details as granular as where a particular student sat in class. He loves to talk about his former students, and it’s clear that he’s proud of their successes.
Though he’s long been retired, Adler says he still fields the occasional 2 a.m. phone call from a former student turned business executive in need of advice.
“They still call me,” he says.