World Teacher’s Day, celebrated on Oct. 5, serves as a time for appreciation, advocacy and spotlights the mentors who have served hundreds of students in their life. The Vermilion spoke with three professors at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who have spent decades of their careers being educators and helping our students become leaders in their communities. 

The Vermilion spoke with Dr. Phillip Auter, graduate coordinator and communication professor, Dr. Mark Smith, interim head of the Department of Management and Barry Jean Ancelet, professor emeritus of francophone studies. 

These professors spoke about their experiences working for the University, being in the teaching profession and what being a part of a learning institution means for them and their careers. 

Almost every teacher has their moment of realization that this is the career path they wish to take. For some people, that decision may come after several other paths taken. For Smith, former head of the Department of Management under B.I. Moody III College of Business Administration, he took the adventurous route.

Recalling that while bringing applications to different jobs across the country, he would ride his motorcycle and sometimes sleep in ditches. He held a variety of jobs, including work with a medical charity in Central America, factory shipping, gas-meter reading and building television sets and recording studios. 

“The key here,” he said, “is to find something both that you can do, and that you can keep your head together, and enjoy enough that you can keep doing for a long time.” He holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Sam Houston State University, an MBA in business management from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in business policy from the University of Washington in Seattle. 

His only other teaching position was at Louisiana State University, and he has remained steadfast with UL Lafayette for decades. Teaching is something that, for him, comes naturally.

“When I found teaching, I said ‘Here is something that I could actually do for 20, 30 years.’ And it turns out, I’ve done it for almost 50,” he said. 

A part of what draws some people to becoming educators is the feeling of connecting with students. Auter has made it his entire career to do so. Though unsure of his path at first, it was through being a graduate student that brought him to education.

He had a teaching assistantship for TV studio production while living in Athens, Georgia, and it set him off. “That was when I decided, yeah, I want to keep doing this. I like grad school, I like teaching and I just kind of never looked back,” he reminisced. 

At the heart of what he loves to do is building a community with students, who then turn and build a community in their respective areas. The satisfaction for him of being a graduate coordinator is not just seeing the students graduate, but to watch them flourish in their careers. 

“That’s the real change that you’re getting to watch and see,” he said. “The fruit of your labors in a sense that these students are going out into the world and pursuing careers and also having an impact.”

Having received the Hubert Bourgeois Endowed Professorship in Communication in 2008 and the Leadership Service Award in 2026, he continues to dedicate his time and efforts in pursuit of student excellence. 

Even after many years of being an educator, the ability to learn new things never stops. Being the best teacher you can be requires opening your mind to new possibilities and new perspectives to grow. Ancelet may have spent 40 years in the classroom, but he does not believe his time of learning is over. 

Now working as emeritus for University, he has spent his entire career learning new ways to teach, even dubbing his own form of teaching “guerilla academics,” which involves him weaving entertainment into his lessons. He has taught an array of different classes from within the Department of Modern Languages and the College of Liberal Arts, a lot of which were his own creation. But he credits his inspiration to the things he learns in the classroom. 

“Some of the best ideas that ever occurred to me came out of those conversations with students,” he recalled. Ancelet never took a sabbatical during his time teaching, and his reasoning was that the most energy he ever felt was in his classroom. 

One-on-ones with students and class participation gave him hundreds of voices to hear from, and when he pushed students, they pushed him further too. 

Being an accomplished writer with several published works, a director of the Lafayette Festival Acadiens et Créoles and a winner of the Humanist of the Year Award, one might think he has learned all there is to know. But Ancelet would surely disagree. 

“Recalling my father’s advice,” he said, “Always keep yourself in a position to be surprised, because if you’re surprised, you’re going to be learning something you didn’t even know.” 

Looking through all three of these teacher’s accomplishments and experiences in the classroom, it’s not hard to see what keeps them motivated to continue being an educator. Whether it was for the love of the game, the impact made on students or the joy of getting to learn something new alongside them. 

As Ancelet succinctly put it, “When I retired, there was a reception, and I said, ‘I’m really happy to be retiring after forty years before the University realized that I would have done it for nothing’.”