Faculty Spotlight | Dr. Tracy Foster, Dean of the School of Business
Dr. Tracy Foster is the Dean of the School of Business at Maranatha Baptist University. As a dean and professor, Foster manages business degree programs and teaches accounting classes. He also chairs the Finance Committee and sits on the Leadership Council. You might know him as a professor or colleague, but a look at his previous occupations will reveal he is much more than that. Foster’s broad range of experiences—from retail food management to financial support for the Pentagon—is bound to amaze and inspire you.
Pre-Military and Early Military
Foster became serious about joining the military while participating in the Junior ROTC program at his high school. (The program was a Naval ROTC program—in the middle of Montana!) God closed the door to the Navy but allowed Foster to marry his wife, whom he had met in the ROTC program. After approximately ten years working for a local grocery store (and becoming second in management of the store) Foster decided to pursue an accounting degree.
“I took that first accounting class and loved it,” Foster says. It just so happened that his university also offered an Army ROTC program, though he wasn’t so sure about the “Army” part. “I didn’t picture myself as somebody running around the woods with a rifle,” he recalls, “but I took ROTC, and I actually enjoyed it more than I thought I would.” In addition to his schooling and ROTC training, Foster also worked 30-hour weeks to support his wife and two children. He was doing weekend drill duty with the Army Reserve each month.
As he neared graduation from college, Foster was torn between pursuing a career as an accountant or as a finance officer in the Army. When it came time to request his military assignment, he listed the Finance branch as his top choice and active-duty service as his second. Foster went on to interview with (and even received a job offer from) an accounting firm when his Professor of Military Science (PMS) contacted him and told him he had been selected for active duty. “And here’s the funny part,” Foster says, “the PMS said, ‘Oh, by the way—you’re going to be an intelligence officer.’”
So, after six months of training, Foster was assigned as a tactical intelligence officer to the Second Armored Division at Fort Hood (now Cavasos), Texas. As an intelligence officer, Foster was responsible for his brigade’s security program. He also participated in training exercises at Fort Hood in addition to lifelike battle simulations—with tanks and armored vehicles—at the National Training Center in the Mojave Desert in California. Although there were no major conflicts or deployments during this time (the Gulf War had recently ended), Foster says, “We trained as if we were going to war.” The whole process enabled intelligence officers to aid in planning for combat operations and to practice gathering and dispersing any information about the enemy to the proper personnel.
Although Foster didn’t mind the security aspect of being an intelligence officer, he wasn’t as fond of the “war gaming” aspect. “Somehow I know God had a purpose for it, but I was just really struggling,” he says. Since he was already a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), he began looking for accounting jobs, confident he would be able to find one. But no jobs came up. “Little did I know that God had a reason for closing that door,” he says. Eventually, God reminded him of the position he had requested upon entrance to the military: the Finance branch. Because his current branch (Intelligence) was short on people, and the Finance branch had enough people, he wasn’t sure he would be able to transfer, but he still requested it. “I said, ‘Lord, if you’re in it, you’ll make it happen,’ and, sure enough, He made it happen.” Foster worked in the Finance branch for 17 years accounting, budgeting, and supervising financial matters. Additionally, he was thankful God had allowed him to be an intelligence officer before he was a finance officer. He recalls how working closely with combat soldiers in the Intelligence branch helped him work more effectively with those same soldiers in the Finance branch: “It gave me some credibility with them, and I understood their operations much better,” he says. While in the Finance branch, Foster acquired his Master of Business Administration (MBA) through the Army Comptrollership Program at Syracuse University.
Finance Branch and National Security
An important period in Foster’s life came when the Lord allowed his family to move back to Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina, (a location where he had previously been for training), in order to be around a solid church for his family. While there, he taught budgeting and accounting courses at the Army Finance School. He taught all kinds of students, from junior noncommissioned officers to colonels to “little old ladies” (and many other Army civilians). Foster thoroughly enjoyed teaching. In fact, he enjoyed it so much that he began thinking, “Wouldn’t it be neat if someday I could teach at college?” This passion for teaching would later contribute to his decision to retire from the military to pursue a career at Maranatha.
During his last six months at Fort Jackson, Foster was deployed to Afghanistan as an individual augmentee (an individual who provides a specific skill or service for a military unit). A newly promoted major at the time, Foster was tasked with providing financial support to the 10th Mountain (Infantry) Division as a part of Operation Enduring Freedom.
When he returned from his overseas deployment, Foster was assigned to Fort Meade, Maryland, near a tall, solitary glass building just off of Interstate 95. “If you just drive by it, you probably don’t think anything about it,” Foster says, “but it’s the NSA.” There, Foster provided financial support for an Army unit connected to the National Security Agency, the largest intelligence agency in the U.S. Department of Defense. His background in intelligence enabled him to fit in well with the intelligence community at Fort Meade. “The Lord allowed me to use my security clearance and intelligence knowledge—and my financial training—in a very cool way,” he says.
Next, Foster participated in an Army program called “Training with Industry” in which the Army allows selected officers in certain career specialties to work for a year with a business in the private sector, learning about business practices and exchanging business ideas. A year in Chicago working with Motorola taught him much about practically applying his financial skills in the private sector. “Believe it or not,” he says, “that was one of my hardest assignments, so I was glad to get back to my regular job in the Army.”
Foster was next assigned to the Third Army unit at Fort McPherson in Atlanta, Georgia, where he worked for one year as a finance desk officer providing financial support to units deployed in Iraq. He then spent several months in Kuwait supporting units deployed under U.S. Central Command. Upon returning to the States and being promoted to lieutenant colonel, Foster was placed in charge of all the desk officers—and of managing roughly $26 billion of Army funding for overseas operations. After some additional financial training at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, Foster was again deployed to Afghanistan for several months while continuing to supervise the desk officers in Atlanta. “It was another crazy year,” he says.
On his way home from one of his deployments, Foster ran into an Army chaplain and shared with him his plans for retirement. Once he reached twenty years of service (which he was about two years shy of at this point), he wanted to retire so he could get more involved in the ministry. But the chaplain asked him if he’d ever considered the fact that God might want him to stay in the military.
“And I said, ‘No,’” Foster recalls. “It had never seriously crossed my mind.” The chaplain challenged him, saying, “Maybe God has allowed you to have all these opportunities to keep you around and allow you to be salt and light [in the Army].”
Foster considered the chaplain’s words and eventually decided, “Lord, if that’s what you want, then I am willing to do that.”
After finishing his work in Georgia, Foster was offered a job at the Pentagon, the headquarters for the United States Department of Defense. There, he worked on the Joint Chiefs of Staff developing and submitting budgets to the United States Congress, which controls the funds the military needs to pay personnel, purchase supplies and equipment, and perform operations. Most people don’t consider the monetary aspect of military matters, but Foster stresses its importance: “If you spend too much, or if you spend the wrong kind of money, you could actually be breaking the law” (U.S. Code 31, Antideficiency Act).
Although he worked long hours on difficult assignments at the Pentagon, Foster considers his time there an “amazing experience.” Many of the projects he worked on went “across the river” to the President’s desk. He also had the weekends off, meaning he and his wife could still actively participate in their local church.
Maranatha
After two years at the Pentagon, Foster was scheduled to take an assignment in Colorado as part of the next step in his promotion to colonel. At the same time, however, he was also considering what he was going to do once he retired from the military. He wanted to get more Bible training so he and his wife could get more involved in ministry. Since one of his previous pastors had recommended Maranatha to him, he began researching the requirements for a Master of Divinity degree on Maranatha’s website. While there, he happened to stumble across a link for a job opening—Maranatha needed an accounting professor.
“Oh, it’s probably an old link,” he thought. Nevertheless, he discussed the matter with his wife, who encouraged him to apply. He wasn’t expecting to hear anything back—yet within two weeks of sending the university the necessary information, he had a phone interview and was invited to see the campus.
“Our visit to campus was on November 11 of 2011 — Veterans Day,” he recalls. “By the time we left that weekend, we had a [job] offer, and it was just neat how God worked it all out timing-wise.”
Foster turned down his offer of the tour that would have earned him his promotion to colonel in favor of teaching at Maranatha. The Lord allowed for his smooth transition out of the military, and, in the fall of 2012, two months after Foster started teaching, he officially retired from the military. “I got here, and I started teaching, and I just loved it,” he says. “The rest is history.”
It’s difficult to sum up a story as remarkable as Dr. Foster’s. With each of his opportunities came new challenges, but he always relied on the Lord to protect him and help him shine Christ’s light in the various environments he worked in. Foster says the Lord protected him as a Christian and gave him plenty of opportunities to have discussions with both believers and unbelievers, even if those conversations didn’t yield direct fruit. Because he and his family moved around so often, they were exposed to a variety of local churches, which Foster says was his family’s “lifeline” throughout his time in the military.
Whether you’re considering possible careers (or currently in the middle of one), Foster’s story offers an important reminder: “God has His way of doing things, and His ways are higher than our ways,” he says. God’s way always works out for those surrendered to His will (as it did for Foster) even if His way doesn’t make sense in the moment. As Foster recalls, with every order he received from the military, “Even though the document title started with ‘Department of the Army,’ if I held up the document in the light, it was almost as if the watermark said ‘from the Lord Jesus Christ’—I knew that my orders were really coming from the Lord.”
Be sure to thank Dr. Foster for his service the next time you see him, and the next time you view budgeting as a pointless and tedious task, remember that our nation’s defense couldn’t operate without it.
To learn more about Dr. Foster, listen to his episode of MBU’s On Mission Podcast, or connect with him and other business leaders at the Leader to Leader Conference. Interested in taking a class with Dr. Foster? Explore MBU’s School of Business or plan a visit to talk with him in person.