UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — While an untold number of friends and colleagues in the Penn State Smeal College of Business community will mourn the loss of John Coyle, they also will be able to celebrate what they gained by knowing him.
Coyle, 87, died on Jan. 16 in State College. He’ll leave behind a legacy of being known as the founder of the business logistics major in the College of Business and laid the groundwork for what eventually became the Department of Supply Chain and Information Systems. He was the first person to teach a business logistics course at Penn State.
It’s the people he taught and those with whom he worked that he embraced the most — many times literally, as he was known to greet friends old and new with a hug.
“His heart was bigger than him; he would help anybody,” said Bob Novack, associate professor of supply chain management. “That's how I will remember him.”
Novack met Coyle in 1976 when he came from Penn State Schuylkill and had a choice between the business logistics course and an operations management course.
“I took the logistics course and it was in the Forum and the instructor was John Coyle,” he said. “I was an economics major at the time. And he just wowed me … his passion, the way he taught. The rest is history, but he's done that to so many people and shaped their careers. He’s been a mentor to me all the way through my professional career and my industry career … and just a true friend.”
Kevin Linderman, chair of the Department of Supply Chain and Information Systems and John C. Coyle Professor in Logistics and Supply Chain Management, didn’t meet Coyle until July 2020, and their initial meeting was at Wegmans in State College.
“I was a little bit unsure what he thought of me, because I'm a new guy coming in from Minnesota and did he like me or not, I wasn't too sure,” Linderman said. “And when I first saw him coming through the door there, I went up to go shake his hand, and he immediately gave me a hug, and he welcomed me into the Penn State family.”
Linderman also befriended Coyle’s son, John Jr., and while attending his first Penn State White Out football game with John Jr. at Beaver Stadium, they visited some tailgate gatherings.
“People would stop John and talk to him and we’d chat a little bit with different people, and they would say, ‘Oh, yeah, we have to get over there and meet your father and see how he's doing’ and all that kind of stuff,” Linderman said. “So it was sort of interesting for me to be walking through all the tailgating going on before the game and see John Coyle Jr. talking to people and they're asking about his dad. It's sort of a long connection that he had with alumni around here.”
While Coyle’s service in academia included roles as assistant dean and director of the undergraduate program (1982-1987), associate dean in the Smeal College of Business (1987-1989) and chair of the University Faculty Senate (1976-1977), he also was Penn State’s longest serving faculty athletic representative to the NCAA (1970-1990) and Big Ten Conference (1990-2000).
He stood out as well for being ahead of his time regarding the burgeoning technology field in the 1970s. Steve Tracey, professor of practice in supply chain management and executive director of the Center for Supply Chain Research, always was impressed by that.
“He decided to put his courses on VHS tapes so students could watch them in the classroom,” Tracey explained. “And he also used this kind of simulcast where he could deliver classes in different places across the campuses remotely before anybody even thought about virtual education. Where he got the idea from, I don't know.”
Novack still has a box of those VHS tapes in his office.
“(John) made 30-minute tapes, big VHS cassette tapes, and then there was a lab in the building that the students could take his introductory course as an independent study; they could go in and view the tapes,” Novack said.
“He was always a little ahead of his time as far as looking at how best to get all of these students through these courses because you only have so much capacity in classrooms. He took advantage of that.”
Novack noted that Coyle was one of the “holy three,” the three faculty or academics who built the discipline. “It was Bud La Londe at Ohio State, Don Bowersox at Michigan State, and John Coyle here,” Novack said.
“We were the first stand-alone logistics department in the country. At one point I think we were like the third largest major in the college and no one really ever knew what logistics was. But he would get in the Forum with 400 students and just wow them because they had no idea what this logistics stuff was. And we got a lot of converts from him.”
Tracey, and others, said Coyle continued to work on research papers until not long before his death.
“He was a bright guy. He was a thoughtful guy. Interesting guy. Even if you look at some of the research we were working on in the last couple of years, we wrote a paper on how artificial intelligence was going to impact the supply chain profession just a couple of years ago,” Tracey said. “Even in his 80s, he was thinking about what's next, what's coming, so I guess it was just always in his DNA.”
Because Coyle was the first to teach a business logistics course at Penn State, there was no specific department and Tracey said Coyle was a “one-man band” at the time.
“They developed a Department of Business Logistics and there was management information systems and an operations management department. They were all separate stand-alone entities,” Tracey said. “So, John was influential in developing the brand at Penn State on business logistics as a stand-alone department within the Smeal College of Business.”
As Coyle was retiring, Tracey said Gene Tyworth, professor emeritus, John J. Coyle Endowed Professor of Supply Chain Management, laid the building blocks of the supply chain management curriculum.
“Around the turn of the millennium, there were two schools, Penn State and Michigan State, and I believe they collaborated on this and decided it was time to move from business logistics to supply chain management,” Tracey said.
Coyle’s academic roles and subsequent awards and honors for those roles are as numerous as the memories of his friends and colleagues.
Charles H. Whiteman, John and Karen Arnold Dean of the Smeal College, said Coyle was a true pioneer.
“John was the founding executive director of Smeal’s world renowned Center for Supply Chain Research,” he said. “But perhaps his most enduring legacy will be the countless senior-level supply chain executives around the world who credit him and his outstanding instruction and counsel for their success in the field.”
Tracey said he’ll treasure the decades-long relationship he shared with Coyle.
“I’ve known John for a long time and he's never changed, he's always been outgoing,” Tracey said. “Whenever you would see him, even in the days of political correctness, whenever you saw John, he would come up and give you a big hug. … It didn’t matter, you were getting a hug from John Coyle.
“He was a physically big man, so that was intimidating, nonetheless. Had a big smile, a commanding voice, happy guy, always positive. He was a good friend that I knew for a long time. And I don't know anybody who is ever going to say anything bad about John Coyle. People were always happy to see him and happy to have known him and were always grateful to what he did for them and their careers, and for that reason kept in touch with him, which is why he had such a big following even beyond his retirement,” Tracey said.
Novack, too, was fortunate to share a long relationship with Coyle. And a few hugs as well.
“Like my daughter said, ‘what I'm going to miss is his bear hugs.’ When he would meet you, he would give you the biggest hug. He was just that type of individual — very caring, very personable,” Novack said.
“He will be missed, but people will always have good memories of John.”