The Value Of Education: Tony Cox '74 Gives Back To Pacific

Early in his administrative career, Tony Cox ’74 walked into an office at the Beaverton School District with a daunting task on his hands.

On the table sat two stacks of paper, both reaching about three feet tall. All job applications. All aspiring teachers looking for a job within the district. His job was to give those hundreds of resumes an initial screening.

“I realized, ‘My God, I hold the future of these people in my hands and I am supposed to read through every one of these,’” Cox said. “So I did and I developed a framework for judging those applications.”

Sorting through those applications illustrated to Cox the need for his fellow educators to learn how to best market themselves and make their experience stand out in what was then a saturated job market in K-12 education. No better place to do that, he thought, than with education students at his alma mater, Pacific University.

Seminars in résumé writing and interviewing led to numerous other service opportunities, both within the College of Education and as an alumni representative on several major university committees. His decades of service and dedication to the university has earned Cox the 2024 Pacific University Alumni Association’s David & Sandy Lowe Outstanding Alumni Service Award.

The award will be presented during Pacific’s Alumni Association Awards Ceremony & Donor Celebration on Thursday, Oct. 10, held in conjunction with the university’s Homecoming & Family Weekend. The Outstanding Alumni Service Award recognizes alumni for significant contributions of time, service and talents to Pacific University through the years.

Cox already knew that Pacific turned out excellent teachers. He parlayed his Pacific education into a 39-year career as an elementary school teacher and principal in the Beaverton and Hillsboro school districts. Along the way, he had hired numerous Pacific graduates to join the staff at schools he was involved with.

But looking over those two stacks of applications, and the wide range of quality of those résumés and cover letters, he came to the realization that College of Education students needed more than instruction on pedagogy, classroom management and curriculum. They needed instruction on how to show the value of a Pacific education and how Pacific alumni can make a difference in the classroom. And to make their first impression a lasting one.

“I used to have class participants count down: One Mississippi, two Mississippi to 10 Mississippi. That’s how much time you’ve got,” he said. “That’s your first interview, and you’ve got to make an impression for them to want to keep talking to you, to invest their time with you.

“At the time I was doing these workshops, the job market was very competitive and there were a lot more applicants than there were positions. So I thought that if there was anything I could do to give Pacific people an edge in that process, I was going to give it to them.”

Providing job search skills was only the start of Cox’s involvement in service to the university. Throughout his teaching career, Cox led student groups to Pacific’s Forest Grove Campus, giving elementary school students an introduction to the idea of a college education.

Over an 18-year span, Cox served in roles as the alumni representative for the University Planning Committee, the College of Education Dean’s Advisory Council, and on numerous presidential and dean’s search committees.

Cox was part of the University Planning Committee that ultimately recommended the construction of the Hillsboro Campus, creating a dedicated home for Pacific’s College of Health Professions. He also was a member of the search committee that hired Phil Creighton as the university’s 16th president in 2003, ushering in an era of growth that Pacific had not experienced since the early 1970s.

It was during that 1970s growth phase that Cox first came to Pacific as a transfer student from Clatsop Community College in Astoria, Oregon. Cox knew that he wanted to be a teacher and had planned on attending the Oregon College of Education (now Western Oregon University). That changed when his history teacher at Clatsop, Mel Berens ’66, took him to visit Pacific.

Pacific not only confirmed Cox’s purpose as an educator but he says it also allowed him to break the cycle of poverty in his own family. “It was real poverty, generational poverty, and I wanted to break out of that desperately,” Cox recalled. “I knew that teaching and being at Pacific was my ticket to the middle class.”

That journey was helped by receiving the Harold S. Tuttle Memorial Scholarship, which was funded by donations given in memory of a professor of education who taught at Pacific in the 1920s.

Cox and his wife, Ann, paid that forward by funding the Schmiedeke-Cox Annual Scholarship Fund. Designated for students transferring to Pacific from community colleges, the fund is one of over 360 donor-funded scholarships available for students at Pacific and one of more than 200 designated for undergraduate students.

Cox finds that the recipients of the scholarship who he has met remind him a lot of the Tony Cox who arrived at Pacific 50 years ago.

“It’s like talking to myself,” Cox said. “They are so thankful and they are excited about their world. But they also come from some tough backgrounds themselves, single parents, people of color and all of that. I’m very gratified to be able to do this work.”

As proud of Cox is of the quality of educators that Pacific produces, he is equally proud of the College of Education’s ability to adapt nimbly to changes in the education landscape. He believes that adaptability has helped improve Pacific’s reputation over the years and, in turn, made his diploma more valuable.

Being able to help Pacific students adapt to that changing world gave Cox the same satisfaction he experienced in his elementary school classroom.

“The biggest thrill of teaching is seeing that light go on and seeing the excitement of a kid change their behavior because of what you have shared with them,” Cox said. “That’s like gold for me.”