Concrete Industry Management - News

Luke Snell, Arizona State University: A passion for teaching concrete

In 1986, Luke Snell, then a professor in the Construction Department at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville (SIUE, where he taught for 27 years) brought his students to ACI's concrete cube competition as the reigning champs. The objective that year was to make the highest compressive strength cubes and the rules stated that a cube failed when it shattered. Snell's students made cubes that were heavily fiber reinforced and that behaved like sponges, so that when tested in compression they squeezed down but never shattered. Although the real compressive strength was low, they met the “specification” and thus won the competition. The rules were changed the following year, but Snell's construction students had learned a valuable lesson.

Throughout his career, Snell, along with his wife Billie, has been teaching concrete lessons to students of all ages. Thousands of his floating concrete kits have been sold to kids to demonstrate how concrete is made and how it can attain unusual properties—such as floatability. As head of the construction program at SIUE for 27 years, his students learned practical construction engineering—and of course excelled in the ACI student competitions.

This past summer Snell took on a new challenge—that of starting a new Construction Industry Management program at Arizona State University. Developed with industry-wide support, the CIM program has, until this past fall, had only the single Middle Tennessee State University program. Today there are four programs that are helping to develop the industry's future leaders, including at California State University—Chico, and New Jersey Institute of Technology. Snell's new program, which resides within the Del Webb School of Construction, has both national and local support and is expected to have a stronger construction focus than the more ready-mixed concrete focus at MTSU.

Following the 2006 World of Concrete, Snell was featured on a CBS Sunday Morning segment, conveying his passion for concrete to the entire nation. He has even moved beyond our borders, with two trips to Mongolia and an upcoming trip to Algeria, teaching good concrete practice and helping to establish ACI chapters. In an SIUE publication in 2001, Billie Snell was quoted as saying, “There are other things in life besides concrete ... but my husband doesn't believe that.”