Professor Emeritus

After twenty-three years in the academy, Cameron Lawrence retired from the University of Montana — reformed, but not repentant. Upon his retirement, the Montana Board of Regents awarded him Emeritus status in recognition of his contributions to the university, his discipline, and the state. He finished his formal career as a Full Professor and Department Chair of Management Information Systems, the largest academic unit in the College of Business.

He earned his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and later completed Harvard Business School’s program for corporate directors, designed to sharpen the judgment and effectiveness of board members. His interests have always lived at the intersection of markets, technology, governance, and human behavior — a crossroads that grows more interesting by the year.

Teaching was never an obligation; it was the point. While at the London School of Economics, he received the highest teaching distinction awarded to Ph.D. candidates for demonstrated excellence in the classroom. At the University of Montana, his undergraduate and graduate teaching evaluations were consistently among the strongest in the College of Business. He was voted Outstanding Professor ten times — a fact he attributes less to brilliance and more to preparation, candor, and a genuine affection for students trying to figure things out.

Beyond the classroom, he served on the Admissions and Curriculum Committees for the MBA and Master’s of Accountancy programs and was elected by his peers to multiple terms in the Faculty Senate. He was also recognized by the University of Montana’s Division of Student Affairs for his long-standing support of students — mentorship he considers among the most meaningful parts of his career.

His scholarly work appeared in leading journals in the field of Management Information Systems, including the European Journal of Information Systems, Journal of Information Systems Education, Communications of the Association for Information Systems, Information Systems Education Journal, and the Journal of Information Technology Theory and Application. He served as an active reviewer for numerous journals and conferences and as co-editor of teaching cases for ISEDJ — work that quietly sustains the discipline from the inside.

His first official act of retirement was to delete his LinkedIn profile — a small but satisfying gesture of liberation. Having spent decades accumulating titles, roles, and affiliations, he found it refreshing to erase the digital résumé and keep only the work itself. It felt less like withdrawal and more like simplification.

If he now calls himself a “reformed academic,” it is only because he has traded committee meetings for ski lifts and faculty memos for river currents. The curiosity remains intact. So does the habit of thinking in frameworks. The difference is that the questions feel less institutional and more personal: What matters? What lasts? And how, exactly, should one spend a finite life?