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(Left to right) Donal O'Shea, Joseph Ellis, Elizabeth Young, Joan Cocks, James Coleman, and President Joanne Creighton at the faculty awards ceremony March 29. |
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(Right to left) Award-winner Joan Cocks with Sally Montgomery and Donal O'Shea. |
Last Wednesday, March 29, MHC
faculty members came out in force to join President Joanne Creighton,
Dean of the Faculty Donal O'Shea, and other members of the MHC
community in paying tribute to the virtuoso teaching and scholarship
of four of their colleagues at a ceremony held in the library's
Stimson Room. During the event, Joan Cocks,
professor of politics and chair of the Critical Social Thought
Program, and James Coleman, professor of dance, each received a Mount
Holyoke College Faculty Prize for Teaching. Joseph Ellis, Ford
Foundation Professor of History, and Elizabeth Young, associate
professor of English and chair of film studies, both were given a
Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Prize for Scholarship. The four
professors received citations and checks for $2,500. In her introductory remarks,
President Creighton noted, "We are celebrating four accomplished
individuals, but we are also celebrating all of you scholar/teachers
who are the heart and soul of this College, who make MHC such a
vibrant educational community. We admire your energy, your ambition,
your intellectual curiosity, your pedagogical creativity, your
commitment to going on all barrels, as scholars, as artists, as
teachers, as citizens and leaders of this College and of the
community." The awardees were selected
through a comprehensive nomination and review process coordinated by
the Faculty Awards Committee, which is composed of Donal O'Shea and
retired faculty members Robert and Eugenia Herbert, Sally Montgomery,
and Marilyn Pryor. Faculty nominated their peers for the scholarship
awards, while alumnae and faculty nominated professors for teaching
honors. Committee members read nominees' scholarly works and reviewed
teaching evaluations and student comments before arriving at their
decisions. Said Montgomery at the
ceremony, "In one way our assignment was enormously easy. It is
simple to identify faculty members whose teaching and scholarship
deserve celebration. But there is a flip side. With so much
excellence it is almost impossible to decide to whom to turn first.
Moreover, comparisons are very difficult when outstanding teaching
takes many forms, and creative scholarship is demonstrated in myriad
ways. This diversity of expression is, indeed, an essential part of
the richness of working and studying here." The teaching and scholarship
awards, given for the first time this year, were made possible by
gifts from members of the MHC board of trustees. The donor of the
teaching award wishes to remain anonymous. Trustee Janet Hickey Tague
'66 endowed the scholarship award in honor of Meribeth E. Cameron,
professor emeritus of history and former acting president and dean of
the faculty at MHC. Cameron taught at the College from 1948 to 1970,
also serving as academic dean and, on a number of occasions, as
acting president of the College. Tague, who took a class in Chinese
history with Cameron, remembers her as "a formidable intellectual
presence on campus." "When I learned of Dean
Cameron's death in 1997," said Tague, "I wanted to do something to
recognize her and to celebrate the centrality of faculty excellence
to the College's mission. What better way to do that than through
establishing this prize fund in her honor?"
Such a learning environment
may actually exist, for these are phrases used by students to
describe classes with Joan Cocks. Joan is an artist at facilitating
classroom discussion. Hers is an art founded on hard work, a lively
and creative intelligence, and a passion for the subject. Students
tell us she is a listener who finds value in what they have to say
and integrates their contributions into discussions, enriching and
expanding the discussion without intruding on the overall plan for
the course. As one said, "She can take my tangled masses of
questions, untangle them, wrap them up neatly, and present my ideas
back to me in an organized fashion that makes it seem as though I was
thinking that all along." Complex ideas are translated
by Joan into simple language, but the ideas themselves are not
simplified, and "challenging" is the watchword for her courses. She
challenges students to question and analyze positions, philosophies,
and theories that they at first do not understand, and with which
they may disagree. Her detailed, thought-provoking criticism demands
clarity,focus, and critical analysis in their writing, yet she always
finds some redeeming feature even in the worst of papers. Students
are also challenged to translate political theory into social action
by confronting current campus and local political and social issues.
Joan's own work provides a
standard against which students might measure the extent to which
they have met these challenges. Marx, Hegel, Luxemburg, Arendt,
Nietzsche, Nairn, and others have been subjected to her critical eye,
and her analysis of embedded contradictions in their language has
provided new insights into the thinking underlying their philosophies
and political theories. Colleagues praise the elegance and clarity of
her explications--her ability to turn a phrase, to choose the right
word, to be a writer. Critical social thought may be an abstract
concept to most of us, but we see it in action in Joan's writings,
where contemporary political theory is placed into the context of
moral and philosophical principles, enlightened by considerations of
cultural and ethnic struggles, and becomes a call to political and
social action. To her students Joan is a
memorable teacher. One student sums it up with passion: "I only wish
I had been able to take more classes with her. It frightens me to
think that I might have missed out on such an experience." To her
colleagues, Joan's rare blend of scholar, teacher, mentor, friend,
exemplifies teaching at its best. Yet Jim and Terese would wish
to be seen also as individuals, and it's Jim's concern for relating
dance to the other arts and humanities that's so consistently
praised. Many of us remember his role as member of the PEW-funded
seminar that explored how the several arts could function in a
liberal arts curriculum. The course sponsored by this seminar, "Doing
It: Creativity, Performance, and the Liberal Arts" helped elevate the
role of dance on this campus, already transformed by the creative
examples and teaching of both Terese and Jim. Memorable works, making
use of the campus itself, made us hope for more such performances.
Jim's role in the Five
College Dance Department has been remarked upon by both students and
faculty at the other colleges. Faculty have been especially taken by
his encouraging junior colleagues in the Five College program to
improve their teaching. Together with Terese Freedman, Jim is praised
by other professionals for the reciprocity of performance and
teaching, a rare enough phenomenon that it inspires special praise.
We learn from student evaluations that Jim's courses stress
choreography, modern dance techniques, contemporary dance history and
aesthetics, and philosophical issues. Very favorable from the
beginning in 1983, the evaluations have grown even stronger with the
years. To their own surprise, students are engaged by Jim's
insistence upon the history, theory, and esthetics of dance. (They
may not know that for his B.A., Jim majored in anthropol ogy and
minored in philosophy.) Some students say that despite the journals he makes them keep, and
all the reading he requires, they are better dancers because they now
understand how intellect and experience work together in the dance.
One Five College student writes that she is --with apparent
wonder--"beginning to look at dance on a more active intellectual
level." Students also remark on Jim's memorable teaching. One writes:
"The fact that he's so passionate about his work means a lot to me.
He reminds me of the professor in the movie, Dead Poet's Society." And another writes: "What has
changed for me [is] to see others change their views of dance." To
have this kind of effect on his students makes Jim Coleman indeed a
model teacher.
Elizabeth's research defies
neat pigeonholes. She moves with confidence, indeed brilliance, from
literature to history, feminist theory to film. She is at home with
the canon and with the anti-canon, with Frankenstein and Frankenhook.
She is not afraid to introduce wit into serious discussions or to
take popular culture seriously. What's more, she writes with a style
that excites pen envy in her peers. How many of her colleagues
secretly wish they had come up with titles like "The Rhett and the
Black" or "A Wound of One's Own"? As an ailing referee wrote in
delight: "Reading her work became a kind of tonic for me that pulled
me out of my prescription-induced stupor. Antibiotics put me to
sleep: Elizabeth Young woke me up." And she added apropos of her book
manuscript, "There is, quite literally, never a dull moment." One has
barely digested the remarkable insights in one sequence before she is
on to the next round of "astonishing ideas." Others agree that
Elizabeth is already such a master stylist that it is hard to believe
this is a first book. It is, they concur, an instant landmark in the
field. No wonder a half dozen presses competed for the right to
publish it! What peers especially single out is Elizabeth's uncanny
ability to bring new insights to familiar texts such as
Uncle Tom's
Cabin and
Gone with the
Wind, as well as to
bring them into dialogue with little or unknown texts. In the words
of one, "she offers brilliantly elucidating 'first readings' of
historical figures and texts that have received little or no
attention, but she also unreads and rereads the always-read." She
also has the extraordinary ability to interweave her literary
criticism with an abundance of historical detail that sets old texts
in new context-to "bounce" the fictions of her texts "off the 'facts'
of the historical moment." Elizabeth's work also marks a
milestone in feminist literary criticism. Her tour de force in taking
Topsy from Uncle Tom's
Cabin as a metaphor
for the topsy-turviness of women's writing characterizes her own
relation to the tradition of women's literary criticism: she
contributes to the tradition all the while turning it inside out and
upside down. Much as Young is versed in theory, she avoids both the
jargon that has often blighted the field and the tedious debates that
have often bogged down feminist discussions of the body and various
strategies of subversion. Another aspect of Elizabeth's
research and writing that has won praise is her ability to weave both
race and gender into her narrative of women's writing. The same holds
for her film criticism, where she also shows a mastery of queer
theory. How many literary scholars can move so effortlessly from the
written word to the screen, from Louisa May Alcott, Margaret
Mitchell, Iola Leroy, and Elizabeth Keckley to The Birth of a Nation and The Silence of the
Lambs and the
Bride of
Frankenstein?
Elizabeth's two published essays on film have already established her
as one of the leading theorists of film. Her book in progress,
Women and Other
Horrors: Film, Feminism, Frankenstein, she sees as complementing
Disarming the
Nation in that it is
a "study of the interconnections among gender, race, and sexuality in
American culture and in feminist theory." Many of Elizabeth Young's
students may be disgruntled that we have chosen her for the research
rather than the teaching award. Perhaps foremost among the qualities
they praise in her teaching is an "awesome" ability to bring them
into the conversation, making them feel they have more brilliant
things to say about the texts than they ever imagined. If her writers
could talk, they might say the same thing--that she has found a
richness in their work that even they didn't know was there.
His first book,
The New England Mind
in Transition, is a
biography of Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, whose career was long and
complex. Joe was particularly interested in Johnson's intellectual
life, which was rich and somewhat bizarre at the end. Critics hailed
the book as a highly imaginative analysis of the intricate
relationship between Puritanism and eighteenth-century rationalism.
That book also signaled Joe's abiding interest in the intellectual
world that brought on the new Republic in the latter third of the
eighteenth century. Joe's next book,
School for Soldiers:
West Point and the Profession of Arms, written with Robert Moore, examines
in-depth the unique social, intellectual, and institutional
experience of West Point in the first seventy years of the twentieth
century, an experience that froze the educational program in some
absurd ways. Joe, however, explores not so much West Point's
absurdities as its ambiguities and the power of those ambiguities.
Knowing the role that Joe has played in the College over nearly
twenty five years, including a decade as Dean, one cannot help but
notice his awareness that institutions are organic, human artifacts
that can get derailed and that are accessible to individuals. One
sees also the intellectual roots of Joe's horror of parochialism and
his insistence that Mount Holyoke face into the world. The third book is a
collection of essays on a variety of figures in the early national
period. This book brings together Joe the intellectual historian with
Joe the commentator on broad themes in American life and thought. One
of his reviewers captures it well in saying that Joe wants not only
to be a responsible scholar, but also to help shape the world of
which he is a part. Joe's fourth and fifth books
Passionate Sage: the
Character and Legacy of John Adams and American Sphinx: The Character of
Thomas Jefferson,
merit much--but need little--comment. They are quite simply
spectacular. They testify to the notion that historians, like wine,
get better and deeper and more complex as they mature. Both books are
accessible to a general readership, yet thoroughly scholarly; both
shed new light on subjects who had received much study. In the words
of a revered historian: "[Joe] has a dazzling imagination, always
responsibly exercised, that finds more in the documentary evidence
than most manage to discover. Unlike many intellectual historians, he
does not venture into the rarified upper atmospheres of philosophical
speculation without having first constructed a firm evidentiary
foundation." Others praise how Joe roots his work in an awareness of
social history and cite his contempt for "corridor history": the
grand history that people talk about in hallways but cannot
accomplish in practice because the evidence is not there. No one can
read much of Joe's work, or listen to him, without noting the grace
and economy of his writing and speaking: few characterizations
capture so much in two words as Passionate Sage or American Sphinx. Joe's books are only a part
of his work. He has journal articles, has edited a number of other
books, and is out there in the media. He is a superb teacher and a
gifted lecturer. He was fascinated by different pedagogies well
before it was fashionable. One of his colleagues writes that Joe "is
a person endowed with enormous drive and self-discipline: there are
very few days --even during the fishing season--when he is not
writing, or correcting papers, or preparing for class by 7 am. Far
from draining him, this boundless, inexhaustible energy infuses
everything he does"--and is.
Faculty Award
Citations
JOAN COCKS
Teachers imagine an academic
utopia in which students eagerly press beyond their present envelope
of understanding and willingly take risks with the unknown;
intellectual engagement between students and professors is founded in
mutual respect; ideas are expressed freely and openly; and each idea
is judged on its own merits without judgment of the person expressing
the idea. Students are liberated to think and ask about questions
they had never considered and achieve deeper levels of analysis and
understanding. Difficult and impenetrable literature by obscure
writers is read by all students, not because they want good grades,
but because they are inspired by the teacher to do so, and because
they want to be prepared so that the class will go well.
JAMES COLEMAN
During interviews with
colleagues in all the arts about possible candidates for teaching
awards, Jim Coleman's name came up more often than any other. Both
Jim and his partner Terese Freedman are cited repeatedly by
professional dancers and colleagues elsewhere as models for college
teachers of dance, and both are credited with giving national stature
to the dance programs at Mount Holyoke and the Five Colleges. There
is little precedent for a dance company functioning as teachers who
incorporate advanced students in their professional tours. They teach
by the example of their own professionalism while stressing issues of
reactive performance rather than inculcating a set of predetermined
recipes. Their success as teachers stems from their sensitivity to an
environment of women dancers, encouraging independent creativity as
well as solidarity--a sense of "company"--in the framework of the
intimacy and physicality of dance movement and its complex
kinesthetic interactions.
ELIZABETH YOUNG
Elizabeth Young
came to Mount Holyoke as one of the most promising scholars of her
generation, a rising star in the firmament of both American studies
and women's studies. She has more than fulfilled that promise with a
series of dazzling articles and the publication this winter of her
book, Disarming the
Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War.
JOSEPH ELLIS
Joe Ellis has been a star, our star,
from the time he came to Mount Holyoke in 1972. Joe now has five
books, not counting edited volumes and a book in press.
photographs by Fred
LeBlanc
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