Editor's Note: This is the second in an occasional series on professors at MiraCosta College, Palomar College and Cal State San Marcos as the schools prepare to welcome students for the fall semester.

SAN MARCOS ---- Scott Greenwood spent much of the summer camped out in a dorm on a college campus in Vermont.

The political science professor expects that the fresh, post-doctoral experience will serve him well later this month when he moves into Cal State San Marcos' University Village as the first faculty member in residence.

Greenwood immersed himself in French at Vermont's pastoral Middlebury College, the language in which much of the literature of the politics of North Africa is written.

Like the other 300 students in the so-called language immersion program ---- not a word of English is supposed to pass through one's lips ---- he made do with a dorm room.

"It's good practice for me," said Greenwood, a Chula Vista native, in a recent phone interview from New England.

Greenwood said the dorm ambience got him thinking about how he will interact with the 460 students in the Village, the university's first on-campus student housing.

He has a lot of ideas, from organizing debates between professors with disparate points of view to conducting survival workshops on how to maneuver the maze and get off to a good start as a college student.

He's thinking, too, about ways to encourage faculty to drop in and hang around and ways to build a sense of community on what has been until now a commuter campus. The 14-year-old university has a current enrollment of about 7,000 students.

Maybe, he said, he'll ask the teachers to adopt a hall, much like businesses and civic groups adopt highways.

"Our job as faculty isn't so much to give them the best advice, but to guide them in finding the best advice possible," he said of helping students with what for many will be life away from home for the first time.

He said he'll tell students to look at college as a training camp for the mind.

"The point is for them to exercise their minds. If they don't exercise their minds, there's no point in going to college."

A surfer and a regular at Carlsbad's Tamarack Beach, Greenwood, 36, trained for his own career at the University of San Diego, where he helped pay his way by serving as a resident assistant at a dorm. He also attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Like lots of other faculty around North County, there may be a genetic component to his career choice. Both Greenwood's parents are retired elementary school teachers, his father in special education and his mother in reading.

"I loved college. I never wanted to leave," he said. "Being a professor basically provides you with the ability to be a perpetual student, and get paid for it."

He concentrates on international relations and zeroes in on the politics of North Africa and the Middle East. He explores questions such as whether business people in different parts of the world want more democracy in their nations or less.

Greenwood's most focused investigation of the question formed the basis of his doctoral dissertation on business-government relations in the Middle East and North Africa. His conclusion: The business people there did not support more democracy.

"They wanted greater economic freedom," he said, "but they did not want greater political freedom because they felt it would lead to instability. They have an interest in seeing that the government guards its own business interests."

On tap for the fall semester: a course on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

"The first thing to understand," Greenwood said, "is that nobody is right and nobody is wrong. It's all based on your beliefs and value system. I'll basically be teaching the students perspective, rather than what land belongs to whom. The class will be about understanding different perspectives."