Editor’s Note: As we gear up to celebrate 60 years of this tradition with you, let’s take a moment to remember some of the best of our previous Distinguished Alumni with Hall of Fame: Rewind. We hope you’ll enjoy reading about our outstanding alumni honorees from the past who shape the ranks of honorees of the future. Ray Perryman, now CEO of The Perryman Group, was named an Outstanding Young Alumnus in 1968 and a 2005 Distinguished Alumni. Perryman, to this day an articulate pillar of knowledge, went on to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Economics and was named Texan of the Year by the Texas Legislative Conference. Click here to watch interviews and speeches from previous Hall of Fame events, or click here to learn more about his year’s event and honorees.
This article was first published in the September 1983 issue of The Baylor Line.
After being asked to write a personal sketch about M. Ray Perryman, a young professor whom I had never met, I mentioned the assignment on the telephone to a Dallas friend who is knowledgeable about Baylor activities. “Ah,” she said, “he is the boy wonder!” Because we were both in a hurry, I did not get to ask her any more about him, but that description lingered in my mind on the way to Waco.
I had reviewed the material about him that was mailed to me, noting that he had been a high school valedictorian and National Merit Scholar, a summa cum laude graduate in 1974 of the Baylor Honors Program majoring in mathematics and economics, that he had made another perfect 4.0 in his doctoral work at Rice University (which he completed in just three years), that he was named the Outstanding Young Economist and Social Scientist in the United States by the National Science Foundation, that he wrote such papers as “On the Ex Poste Determination of the Nature of Exogenous Disturbances in an Economic” and “An Indirect Empirical Demonstration of the Bias in Endogenous Indicators of Monetary Policy,” and, finally, that he had been promoted in an unprecedented way to full professorship at the age of thirty. So, while driving, I idly concocted a mental image. I imagined a probably thin, intense, and somewhat solemn, slightly pretentious young man in a navy blue suit whom I might have a difficulty understanding.
In reality, what I found was a short, stocky and amiable young man wearing a striped sport shirt and khaki pants (which were definitely the opposite of what my teenagers call “floods”) and who was completely unpretentious and naturally articulate on any level. He was also wearing a large round plastic button emblazoned with the words, “I Attended Skye Lynn’s First Birthday Party.” Ray Perryman fits no stereotype. He is just himself.
After talking with him for a few hours, I found it easy to understand why he had been elected as “most popular professor” in his first year of teaching in the Hankamer School of Business. Perryman displays a former debater’s talent for communication, a zest for explaining a somewhat esoteric subject, a high energy level, a sense of humor, and just plain intellectual curiosity—an unbeatable combination in a teacher.
The ability to laugh at himself, not altogether a common trait among professors, was one of his obvious characteristics, and he told this story with genuine laughter: After he had received the Distinguished Professor Award from the Hankamer School of Business in 1979, a colleague told him, “I can understand an award to you for being intelligent, and I can even understand an award for being prolific or productive, or a number of other adjectives, but distinguished just doesn’t fit you!”
Perryman is inherently casual in his speech and in his manner, but he dresses casually for a pragmatic reason. His work is not only cerebral but also reasonably physical, requiring the constant handling of large boxes of computer output and, since Perryman is short, frequent climbing to reach material. It also involves long hours, for at one point it was not uncommon for him to work at his office in the Hankamer building from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m.
His bright and capable wife, Nancy Satterwhite Perryman, who is his research assistant as well, explains, “Almost everything that we do, we do out of a need for efficiency—to get the job done. Ray will wear whatever is necessary. But if it is easier to get the point across in a suit on a certain day, Ray will wear a suit.” Perryman says with a grin that he can “rise to the occasion” in dressing, as when he appears before a Congressional committee in Washington, D.C.
The young professor may not be distinguished in the sense of being dignified in conduct or appearance, but he definitely is distinguished in the sense of excellence and eminence, for he is outstanding in his field. He is the Herman Brown Professor of Economics and the founder and director of the Center for the Advancement of Economic Analysis at Baylor. He is also director of the Baylor University Forecasting Service and is the creator of the Texas Econometric Model, a forecasting tool. Perryman saw a need for this model at the governmental level and developed it in Waco. Because of Perryman’s reputation, major corporations and governments throughout the world actively solicit his consultation and advice on policy matters. His recent book, The Measurement of Monetary Policy, cemented his reputation as one of the foremost authorities on questions of economic policy.
Perryman has received a number of awards for his research projects, including the first award for outstanding research achievement in economics given a Rice University alumnus. He is currently involved in even more research than before and has reached the plateau in his career where he is often invited to write a paper on a topic because members of his field want that area investigated.
Perryman has published hundreds of scholarly papers, articles, and books, but he says that writing does not come easily to him. He works hard at it, often writing between 1 and 3 a.m. He is versatile in his output, having published in fifteen different disciplines. Perryman has written everything from stories about Sherlock Holmes to very technical, weird (his word), sophisticated mathematical treatises.
Nancy Perryman introduced him to the joys of reading Sherlock Holmes because she thought he was spending too much time with his work and needed distraction. Perryman enjoyed the Holmes stories, decided that Sherlock had used some economic theories in solving crimes, and proceeded to write several papers in the attempt to demonstrate that theory.
Versatility may be Perryman’s strongest intellectual asset, in addition to his ability to bridge disciplines and to synthesize material. He can switch with ease from a specific problem, such as how to estimate equations from very large simultaneous systems with complex properties, to a very general question, such as how do you model society? But regardless, whether the problem is general or specific, Perryman’s attitude is “I will solve this problem. I will do it, I will fix it, I will run through a brick wall to get it done.” He says both he and Nancy share this attitude toward their work.
Nancy and Ray Perryman complement each other. They have an effective partnership in their work and in their marriage. In fact, their relationship seems to be a synergism, in which the effect of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Mrs. Perryman, who was also a math major and has a master’s degree in economics, works in the office next to her husband’s. Because Perryman was gone from home so much, either studying or working, she began working with him to be near him. Now they do everything together and her name has joined his on some of their research material. She and Leigh Humphrey, Perryman’s administrative assistant, “make everything work,” he says.
They do the core work, with Mrs. Perryman solving the computer problems, leaving Perryman himself free to overcome the intellectual barriers in their projects. Often in his work Perryman produces groundbreaking ideas. In some of his mathematical analysis, he has developed a new strain of statistical theory. He is actually doing things with mathematical methods that have not been done before.
Perryman is well known in the corporate community, as well as in academic circles. He is the author of Trends in the Texas Economy and the Texas Economic Update, subscription services which provide detailed and continuing projections from the Texas Econometric Model. He contributes to Texas Business magazine, the Texas Bankers Record and Business Review. He also often provides the data used in Business Edition, the Public Broadcasting System’s weekly program. He is the writer and co-host of a monthly economic information program called Money Facts, which is presented in metropolitan areas throughout Texas.
Perryman, who is the son of Mr. and Mrs. M. A. Perryman, says he was not a child prodigy in his hometown of Lindale, Texas. He was just a “regular guy,” active in high school debate and band (as an all-American saxophone player) and, like other eighteen-year-olds in 1971, worried about the war in Viet Nam.
He and Nancy, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. T. A. Satterwhite of Magnolia, Texas, were married during their Baylor years. They both worked during Perryman’s graduate school days—with little free time or extra money. “Surviving was our hobby,” Perryman explained. Their financial hardships have lessened now, and they are replacing their graduate school hand-me-down furniture with new Queen Anne cherry and oak. They are able to add to their collection of Blue Willow china more easily, too, and have about 450 pieces; and their enduring Ford Mustang has given way to a yellow Cadillac Biarritz.
Their first child, a daughter, Skye Lynn, was welcomed last year. Her name is an adaptation of the Dutch word for scholar, schyler, which they both liked—”for obvious reasons,” Nancy Perryman said. Skye Lynn’s first birthday party was a great event on June 4, 1983. Forty people were invited, and family members were coming in shifts. All who attended were given commemorative buttons like the one Perryman was wearing when I first met him. (Perryman “leaked” to the Line just before press time that he and Nancy are expecting a second child.)
His total accomplishments at Baylor led to his being named a full professor after just six years of teaching, an unusual circumstance. President Herbert Reynolds describes him as a very rare individual who has already achieved generally what people twice his age have achieved. He said that young men have excelled at Baylor before (Burleson was only twenty-eight when he was president), but not in recent history has anyone like Perryman appeared.
Reynolds believes that the young professor’s value to Baylor lies in three areas: “Ray is first and foremost a very decent and good human being. He is unassuming, very much down to earth and fun to be around. He is a wonderful Christian man and his character is impeccable. He is a good role model for our students and his colleagues. Secondly, he is an excellent teacher as well as an excellent researcher, a rare combination in the degree to which it exists in him. Thirdly, he has a wonderfully creative mind, an innovative and comprehensive way of looking at things.”
“I might add, also,” Reynolds said, “that he is very much a devoted family man who loves his wife and daughter. He is a person almost anyone would want to emulate. We hope he will stay at Baylor for forty more years!”
In answering my question about the facet of his work that pleases him most, Perryman explained, “The whole process of the work gives me satisfaction, but I’m very pleased with the Texas Econometric Model because the odds against achieving it at a private school like Baylor were astronomical.”
Perryman feels that the use of models will be a growing trend, because in times of economic uncertainty, like the present, people turn to comprehensive forecasting systems. “Stable days seem to be gone forever,” he said. “We are in for a lot of jumping around.”
This unevenness challenges Perryman. “Someone once said of economics that it was much like the music of Mozart—that initially it seems very simple—a child can enjoy it, can grasp its principles—but when you look at the intricacies, there are more puzzles than can be solved in any lifetime. That diversity and that challenge in economics appeal to me,” he said.
Perryman is an unpretentious man, yet at the same time, he can correctly refer to himself as “cocky,” as he does. Cocky means cheerfully self-confident, and, with his gifts, it is entirely appropriate that Perryman feel that way. While he is not thin, he rejoices that his I.Q. is still greater than his weight. (Not many of us can say that.)
M. Ray Perryman is plainly a “boy wonder.” But even that term is possibly too limiting. He is more like a young Renaissance man, more like a young Leonardo.
