Re “West L.A. College Calls Him Mr. President”
Second in a series
[img]1341|left|Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh||no_popup[/img]Born and raised in Jordan, it was perfectly natural for the academician Nabil Abu-Ghazaleh to gravitate toward a career in engineering before finding his true calling. Everybody in his high school graduating class, he recalls, chose either medicine or engineering.
“Given the economics of the Middle East,” says the new President of West Los Angeles College, “engineering and medicine were the only fields where you could feel there was a living to be made – unless you were independently wealthy. My family certainly was not.”
Glancing over his shoulder at his 9,000-miles-away homeland he left forever as an 18-year-old, Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh has no regrets about his chosen direction.
He seems never to have looked back.
Setting out alone with a foreign visa in the 1980s, he headed for U.C. San Diego, where he earned degrees in engineering sciences before gaining a Master’s in higher education from UCLA, and now he is pursuing his doctorate in that field at Cal State Fullerton.
For Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh, he soon realized America, especially Southern California, offers a far more fertile present and promising future than the uncertainty that continues to plague Jordan, one of the low-profile states in the region.
Returning Not an Option
“Conditions are challenging there,” he says, ever speaking softly. “It’s a Third World country, a difficult living. Honestly, I don’t know that I have the advantages to make it. I don’t know the business environment. I am not a businessperson anyway.
“Could I go back? Probably not. My heart is here.
“All I know is Southern California, really.”
Academia and engineering never were competing for primacy in his mind. Each had its separate time with him.
As a young man, Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh said, “I was certainly good technically, although I have to say over the years, my strengths have shifted from the technical to the verbal. That comes with practice and with work experience.”
Change Was Not Planned
“I fell into education as a career,” he says. “As an engineer who had a computer background for my Master’s degree, – structural analysis, software development, that put me in a natural place to teach other engineers how to use computers.
“The notion of teaching then developed. I had (served as a teacher’s aide) in lab classes as a graduate student. I thought TA’ing was great fun, not really work.
“When I was in a professional environment, I observed that I enjoyed the teaching aspect more than the technology aspect. Those were heady times. It was fun. We were developing curriculum. The software was being developed by others, but it was being developed live. We would develop curriculum as the training was going on. We team tagged, my fellow instructors and I. One would go out and write the next chapter while the other person taught the chapter that just had been written.
“This was the kind of teaching that triggered what became my main interest. Teaching in a technical area truly was enjoyable.
“In the mid-, late ‘80s and into the ‘90s, technology was developing so rapidly that I claimed in 10 years of teaching, I never taught the same course twice.
(To be continued)
