Introduction

John N. Warfield was a man of many talents. An accomplished computer scientist, a renowned professor, and a veteran, Warfield was a leader in several communities including the George Mason University academic body. As a young man, Warfield quickly rose through the ranks of multiple universities, first pursuing computer science and later computer-integrated management. Professor Warfield ended his career in academics at GMU as a pioneer of the Interactive Management program and the creator of the university's first Demosophia room, the latter of which is the central theme of this project.

While researching John N. Warfield's career, I was reminded of the following quote from Lawrence Levine in the first chapter of The Princeton Guide to Historical Research: "Although we might operate in cycles of historical interpretations, the general movement was upward toward an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the past" (p. 21-22). During the mid-late 20th century, historians studying Warfield's career would likely have focused their historical analysis around the professor's Demosophia passion project. Today's historians (such as myself) would interpret Warfield's Demosophia project as a short-lived experiment that the business department quickly outgrew as technology advanced and the management field changed. In the current cycle of historical interpretation, I would say that Warfield's greatest success as a management scholar was not the Demosophia project, but rather his advocacy for technology-integrated management programs and systems analysis studies at GMU. If one looks at the larger picture, including the success of Mason's current business program, it is easy to see how historical analysis of Warfield's legacy contributes "toward an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the past" of the Mason business school and the university broadly.