Even though David McCoy practically grew up in a community college classroom, he had to go to Russia to find his own calling as a teacher.

With both parents DCCCD professors — his mom Clarice at Brookhaven and his dad David at Eastfield — David always loved to learn, sitting in on college classes before he was out of grade school. He went to Hendrix College, a small liberal arts school in Arkansas, and spent his junior year abroad at Oxford University, beginning a lifelong love of educational travel.

But it wasn’t until a friendship with a visiting Russian law professor turned into an invitation to lecture to fellow college students in St. Petersburg that he began to think of teaching as a career he might pursue himself.

Fast forward through a bachelor’s degree from Hendrix, two years off after college to work in a bookstore and as a teaching assistant in a psychiatric institution in Little Rock, and a stint as a management trainee for the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Russia Bureau in Washington, D.C.

Oh, and a law degree from Harvard University.

“After I got out of law school, I had been in school so long that I was eager to work,” he says. “I had taken accounting at Brookhaven before I went to law school, and with both of my parents DCCCD professors, I have a strong belief in the community college district.” When a government faculty position became available at Cedar Valley College, he jumped on it and realized that he had indeed found his calling as a professor.

He still loves combining learning and travel, though, and somehow manages to keep taking academic adventures abroad. He spent nine months in France researching the political origins of the French Constitutional Council, as well as what he calls “abusing the French language.” In the summer of 2007, he traveled to Senegal with Fulbright funding to study the west African country’s emerging democracy, narrowly escaping grave injury at the tusks of a warthog. Summer of 2008 found him heading off to Paris (France, not Texas) for a six-week stint, well, because the opportunity was there.

What he is not about is keeping to the status quo, either on his own time or on his students’. “I try to provoke my students,” he says. “I want them to be able to ask the right questions. I guess I teach a soft version of the Socratic method. I’m not there to change their minds but to challenge their deeply held assumptions.

“I think it was St. Augustine who said, ‘If the highest aim of the captain is to preserve the ship, it would never leave port.’ I try to go to the roots of why we think what we think, which influences where we go.”

This is one professor who has definitely left port. For David McCoy, it all began here.