Armour's wife, Wendy, a graduate of Mt. Holyoke College and a current professor of law at Boston University, co-chairs the Class of 2007 Parents' Fund with him. Last year they worked to raise $625,900 for the annual fund. "Tuition actually only covers 60 percent of the cost of putting a student through an Amherst education," said Associate Director of the Annual Fund Carrie Cuthbert, who has worked a great deal with the Armours. "The work that Tim and Wendy do with the annual fund directly benefits current students to help cover the difference."
Commitment to Amherst
After graduating with a major in political science, Armour earned his master's degree at UMass-Amherst while working in the College's Alumni Office for three years. In the class letter that he wrote in 1995, Armour said, "My first job was one of the best … The whole point was to help people feel good about themselves, their Amherst experience, and to help them help the College to perpetuate that experience. That is a great job!"
Even after leaving Amherst for Harvard University to earn his masters of business administration, Armour remained involved with the College. "I fell in love with Amherst and I always will love it," he said. Armour also remains active in his class' contributions to Amherst. He is a class agent and helps to raise alumni endowments. "Tim has always been a very loyal, solid Amherst alumnus ever since he graduated," said Bill Vickery '57, Assistant Treasurer and a long-time friend of Armour.
Much of Armour's early career was focused on alumni fundraising and administration within the university setting. During his degree work at Harvard, Amour worked for its Alumni Office and after graduating in 1975, he remained in Cambridge working for Harvard's Placement Office. Armour became deeply entrenched in the business school at Harvard, becoming the administrative head of Executive Education. He later served as the Assistant for the Dean of the MBA program, working on a range of concerns including admissions, registrar and student activities. He then returned to an alumni fundraiser-oriented career as associate dean.
Putting the MBA into practice
After 10 years at Harvard in education administration, Armour decided that it was time for a change. He joined a friend's family business and became Vice President of Marketing at Butcher Polish Company, where he spent three years. "Butcher Polish was fun because we doubled the revenue of the company in two years and that was an 'MBA' thing to do, but after all, it was selling wax," he joked.
Armour went on to found Teleware Inc. with a newly-minted Harvard Business School graduate. The company familiarized small architectural firms with the advent of personal computers. "The computer business was fun because it was building a business. We started it from scratch," Armour reminisced. "It was helping small contractors, which were usually a husband and wife team struggling to hold their business together, and it was fun showing them how to use computers and introducing them to software which made their businesses a lot more productive."
Exploring with JASON
Branching out into the business world helped Armour realized that he was most interested in-what he called the "mission-orientation of education." While he was considering re-entry into a college setting, Armour was serendipitously contacted by the two-year-old JASON project. The JASON project is an innovative, non-profit educational program, the brainchild of Dr. Robart Ballard, the scientist who found the wreck of the RMS Titanic. According to Armour, "[JASON's mission is] to inspire kids and excite them about their education rather than help them count the stripes on a zebra."
Every year, a two-week expedition with genuine scientific goals is sent to an exotic location anywhere on the planet. Students and their teachers observe through live broadcasts, and the expeditions are later put on VHS and DVD. This supplementary science material is accompanied by a curriculum developed by a team of scientists and teachers. As the executive vice president, Armour oversees the programming of the project. He describes himself as the intermediary between scientists and students. " I've enabled [the scientists] to do their work and tried to facilitate the connection between kids and the scientists. That's really my role," said Armour. "It's not being out front, it's not being in front of the camera, it's not doing the science-I'm not the one who inspires the kids. But I help build and set up the mechanism to allow that to happen."
Armour himself participates in the annual expedition, which in past years has included voyages to active volcanoes in Hawaii, the glaciers in Alaska, the Amazon Rainforest, Yellowstone National Park, the coral reefs in Bermuda, the Galapagos Islands and other equally exciting locations. "I've been very, very fortunate to experience these expeditions and do it in the context of sharing it with a million kids," he said.
Armour's work with JASON reverberates throughout the world. The JASON project broadcasts to schools in the U.S., Canada and Mexico as well as to places as diverse as Bermuda, Peru, Panama and Sweden. The JASON project started off with just Armour and a $1 million budget. Today, JASON consists of 45 people and has an annual budget of $14 million. Armour emphasized that the most significant change is that JASON only reached about 150,000 students in its early years, while JASON now reaches 1.7 million students and 35,000 teachers from grades 4-9. The program operates in both English and Spanish. Additionally, components of the JASON program are exhibited in science museums around the U.S. and Canada. Colleges and universities have also found a way to connect with the JASON project, using it as a link for community outreach programs with local elementary, middle and high schools.
The value of science
The desire to share with students the possibilities in the field of science stems from Armour's own experiences avoiding science as a student, though he does fondly recall his natural science course at Amherst, "Problems of Inquiry," with professor of chemistry Allen Kropf. "The substance of the course was on the Copernican Revolution. We read the classic book on Copernicus by Kuhn and I loved that book because it was all about thinking in new paradigms. It was about science, but it was really about breaking out of paradigms and thinking about things in very different ways. It was a great experience that I've tried to bring to JASON," he said. Kropf, whom Armour believed would never remember him, recalled him as, though not a science major, "an eager and inquiring young man with a very enthusiastic attitude toward this course … I recall him as someone who wanted to learn about science and someone who found the subjects we studied challenging." Although Armour did not continue taking science courses after that class, he emphasizes that one of JASON's missions is to encourage students to explore science as he was able to do.
Amherst education
Armour emphasizes that his participation in Amherst's strong liberal arts program has been the key to his ability to work in such diverse career environments. He highlights writing and expression as the most essential skills in his work. "Above all things, Tim's personality, his interpersonal skills, and his ability to manage and deal with people are better than of those anyone I've met," said Morrie Bailey '70, a former roommate and close friend of Armour. "The combination of conceptual intelligence, articulateness and his caring for other people are really the cornerstones of how I see Tim, and are the traits that I think have made him so successful. Tim is one of the great examples of what Amherst produces, no question about it." Armour embodies the liberal arts philosophy, a man who uses his variety of academic tools to follow his passions. Fortunately for students, Armour's passion is improving education.