It was 1957. Michael Gordon ’61, a freshman at Lehigh University, had been set up on a blind date with a girl named Sally May. He couldn’t wait to meet her. So he and his cousin stopped by her parents’ apartment in New York City unannounced. “I knocked on the door, and she answered,” remembers Michael. “It was love at first sight. I was off the market immediately.”
For 68 years, Michael and Sally May have built a life and family together. Both had careers in education: he, a college management professor and she, a physical education teacher. They also shared the same educational philosophy that teaching should not be confined to the classroom — students learn best by doing.
When Shaun McNulty ’22, assistant director of the Lehigh Fund, told Michael and Sally May about the Soaring Together Scholarship Program, they were intrigued. Established in 2023 to commemorate 50 years of coeducation at Lehigh, the Soaring Together scholarship brings top students who embody the spirit of coeducation and equitable community to campus. The program helps students build a strong foundation for success beyond college by providing them with a full-tuition merit scholarship, alumni support, career and professional development, and valuable experiential learning opportunities.
“The elements of this program struck a responsive chord,” says Michael. “Both of us wanted encounters with our students that helped prepare them for life following graduation.”
It was Lehigh’s Gryphon Society that introduced Michael to experiential learning and changed his career path. He was a founding member of the Gryphons (resident hall students serving as counselors to incoming freshmen), the first occasion that he was a member of an organization.
“Membership interested me to find out the proper way to select, train, and motivate in an organization,” says Michael. And that, he found, was the province of an industrial psychologist. He switched majors from pre-med to psychology, earned his master’s degree in psychology at Syracuse University and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
During his tenure as a professor, first at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, then at Rutgers University, Michael provided students with opportunities for independent study that enabled them to apply the course subject matter to a real-world issue. “Assigning articles from the leading business newspapers hopefully made keeping up with commercial practice habitual once they launched their own career.” Students were also included in his research. “If graduate students had one or two publications, it would give them a leg up on the competition for academic jobs,” he says. Michael did the same for fellow untenured faculty. “It helped with their careers.”
In honor of his support of students and dedication to teaching, Michael received many accolades, including Outstanding Faculty Member Award, Alumni Outstanding Teacher Award, Distinguished Service Professor, and College of Business Faculty Scholar. At the University of Tennessee at Rutgers, he was the recipient of the Thomas Mott Award for Excellence in Teaching, the “Teaches the Most Practical Course” Award, and the “Best Management Professor” Award. Additionally, he published three books, reviewed research papers for top-tier journals, and founded and edited a journal for the AFL-CIO.
Sally’s career emphasized experiential learning — as a teacher of physical education. “I love activity, and I love sports,” says Sally. And despite being dually enrolled in Syracuse University’s School of Education and the School of Arts and Sciences, she still had time to student-teach in the community. “My experience there reminds me of what the Soaring Together Program is because it’s preparing people to be successful in their field and giving them an opportunity to experience it. Not all colleges have the luxury to offer that kind of program,” says Sally. Her master’s degree in health and physical education from the University of Tennessee trained her to emphasize making exercise a habitual component of students’ post-school lives.
The Gordons want Soaring Together Scholars to have experiences that will help shape their careers. “If they want to be an engineer, they can study with one and find out exactly what it’s like. And then when they enter the job market, they are ready for their career,” says Michael. Adds Sally, “This will help them land better jobs. Employers would be very happy to see someone who’s not just green out of college, but they’ve actually done the work and they can handle it.”
For Soaring Together scholar Olivia Meyer ’27, that’s exactly what happened in her first year as a mechanical engineering major. “As part of the experiential learning element, I traveled to Sierra Leone, West Africa, last year with a research team studying their healthcare system. I’m really interested in how wearable technology can be useful in healthcare, and we’re developing a device that can alleviate bottlenecks in caring for patients,” she says. One of the most exciting elements of the program for Meyer and her fellow scholars is that early on, it helps them to find their niche. “Now, it’s my passion,” she says.
