April
30 ,
2004
Five
MHC Professors Garner Teaching and Scholarship Awards
Five Mount Holyoke faculty members were honored for outstanding
teaching and scholarship at an awards ceremony Wednesday, April
28 in Pratt Hall. Lois Brown, associate professor of English,
and Stan Rachootin, professor of biological sciences, received
the Mount Holyoke College Faculty Prize for Teaching. Michael
Robinson, professor of economics, and Mary Jo Salter and Brad
Leithauser, Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturers in the Humanities,
garnered the Maribeth E. Cameron Faculty Prize for Scholarship.
The five professors received citations (that appear here in their
entirety) and checks for $2,500.
Lois Brown
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Lois Brown is on a hunt, a hunt for lost and silenced voices
of nineteenth-century African Americans. She takes both her
readers and her students along with her, inviting us and
them to sit
down and listen for a while to the complex narratives of Americans
intent on defining themselves and reporting accurately about
the worlds in which they lived. Her first book, Memoir
of James Jackson by his Teacher, Miss Susan Paul, was an edition of
what had been lost and is now recognized as the first African
American
biography. It is no coincidence that Lois Brown would write
first of all about a young student and his teacher, nor that
the text
itself would reshape our understanding of the lives of African
American children, on one hand, and the development of African
American literature, on the other. Her teaching and scholarly
work spring from the same rich loam and reflect the same deep
commitment to understanding how African American writers and
thinkers have used the power of the word in their own search
for freedom and justice.
And this is what
she teaches her students: the power of the word—read,
spoken, and written—in their own search for freedom and
justice. A first-year student describes her experience in Lois
Brown’s seminar, Memories of Home: “She encourages
us to write with power. And when we read, she directs us to the
meat of the meaning.” And how does she direct 18 new students
to find “the meat of the meaning?” Another student
answers: “Professor Brown impressed me greatly with
her ability to lead innovative and challenging discussions,
posing
provocative questions and pushing us all just a little
bit further. She never dictated the dialogue; she merely
(!)
nudged us toward
our own ideas, gracefully.”
Graceful, undoubtedly, as we all know her to be. And enthusiastic
and exciting. Students in her Nineteenth Century American
Women writers course add, unanimously, “amazing!” “An
unsurpassed teacher of English, and at 8:35!” Another said, “The
most enthusiastic and inspiring instructor I have ever had.” “Tough
but fair” is the complementary theme, to amazing and inspiring,
certain evidence of her students’ (and our) willingness
to work very hard, when the work helps them find their own voices
and their own understandings of their place in the world. She
is “dynamic, articulate, and commanding; she demands quality!” And
another: “She forces you to think; you don’t
get away with 50 percent effort in this class, ever.”
Students in her very popular 300-level seminar on Toni
Morrison reflect on their discussions together: “She fosters great
class discussions that truly leave us mesmerized and challenged.” A
classmate said, “she pushed us to think harder
and reach into issues much more deeply. One cannot leave
this
class without
a sense of growth and development as a reader and a critic
of English literature.”
How does she do this? She uses three tools: she leads
stimulating and provocative class discussions, with close
attention
to the texts and their contexts, essentially yoking together
the processes
of critical reading and discussion in every class period.
One student in her seminar, Slavery and the Literary
Tradition, reported this: “Her refusal to accept
incomplete statements helped me to develop my critical
analytic skills, and as
a woman, I
particularly appreciated her encouragement to make direct
and unqualified statements, with no excuses.”
Her
second tool is how closely she works with students as writers themselves,
even in the survey courses.
She helps
students
develop paper topics, encourages revisions, and, as
one student says, “gives
you the time you need to really write a piece you were happy
with.” Another voice found and amplified.
Her own self and her attention to students’ own development
is her third potent tool. A senior English major reported “the
personal attention that Professor Brown provided me and her interest
in my whole education was the first instance in my four years
at Mount Holyoke that I felt a professor had truly taken the
time to give me feedback well beyond a simple grade.” She
teaches students with the same care with which she
teaches texts.
We honor Lois Brown today as a consummate teacher, who
listens with deep respect both to the once lost voices
of African Americans
and to the newly emerging voices of her students. Our
community conversations are deeply enriched by her
presence.
Stan Rachootin
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A Renaissance man,
according to Webster, is one “having
varied interest and expertise in several areas.” For Stan
Rachootin, “several areas” include all of science
(past, present, and future) as well as literature, art, fine
cuisine, and world affairs. Not surprisingly then, his contributions
were central to the development of Past and Presences where a
colleague described his teaching as “stunning.” Stan’s
classroom is alive with dazzling ideas and brilliant insights—his
passion for knowledge is such that he is excited by the latest
discoveries in everyone else’s field of study,
as well as his own. Thus he has integrated hot,
up-to-the-minute
research topics (such as evolutionary relationships
tested by DNA analysis)
with important minutiae gleaned from fragile nineteenth-century
natural history manuscripts.
Stan loves examples from biology that prove the
rules, but much prefers evidence that contradicts
them,
because he wants
students
to appreciate how diverse and complex the biological
world really is. He teaches that science is a
work-in-progress, with changing
assumptions, and he likes to provoke his students
with questions that challenge them to really
use the intellectual
content
of his course. Excited by creative pedagogy,
he is always ready to try the unusual, to broaden
and deepen
the biology
curriculum.
Stan teaches large numbers of students: 80 in
introductory biology,
50 in ecology and evolution, and three smaller
advanced classes: macroevolution, invertebrate
biology, and
a course
on Darwin.
In all of these, his students find him understanding,
kind-hearted, funny, eccentric, and excellent.
His evaluations are fabulous: “Stan
is an awesome professor!” “He is a professor I will
always remember after college.” “Stan is prepared
as if his life might someday be dependent upon recalling an obscure
fact about a forgotten worm.” “I
enjoyed learning from someone who has found his
bliss.”
Several themes reoccur in the student comments.
One is that Stan makes them think deeply. “This class has made me think
(to the point of headaches) in ways I would never have imagined.” “There
may not be a correct answer to the question, so it’s necessary
to think about possible answers and come up with supporting ideas.” This,
of course, actually reflects what scientists do—come up
with supporting ideas for their own findings. Another theme concerns
Stan’s amazing collections. His home, office, and lab are
filled with antique books and first editions, original prints
and artwork. In between the books are biological specimens of
all types, from fossils and pickled crabs to living stick insects
and hissing cockroaches. He believes that these treasures are
for sharing, and students speak often of the pleasures of handling
such material. “For every class he came prepared with old
books, slides, or objects which made his lectures come alive.” “The
show-and-tell aspect of the class with slides
and books and pictures really made the class.”
Stan is a gifted storyteller, and spins out
tales of molecules, populations, and eons
of transformation.
As students have
commented, “Stan
tells stories really well about the material which makes it very
easy to learn.” “We read poems, sang songs, heard
stories, looked at specimens.” So what kind of story teaches
a complex topic about evolution? Here’s one simplified
version. Each year, Stan brings two vertebrae to class—one
from a cow, and one from a camel. With these in hand, Stan points
out that the cow vertebra has a separate opening for the artery
supplying blood to the brain. However, in the camel bone, the
artery takes quite a different route—sometimes through
a similar hole, but sometimes through the channel for the spinal
cord. Camels are the only living mammals with such a system.
Not surprisingly then, when Darwin learned of a fossil animal
that had the camel’s type of vertebral
openings, he thought the two animals must
be related. But
as Stan happily
explains,
Darwin was wrong, and the camel bone illustrates
the first known case of homoplasy, where
a similar trait arose twice
independently
during evolution. This story demonstrates
a major modern concept in a clear-cut (and
visualizable)
way. Stan has hundreds
of these
stories, but the camel bone is one of his
best, since he first learned about this as
a ninth grader!
There is grandeur in Stan’s view of life, to paraphrase
Darwin—a grandeur that he conveys with passion to his students.
Stan has truly found “his bliss.” The
students know it and, as they articulate
in evaluation after evaluation,
we
are lucky to have him.
Mike Robinson
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Mike Robinson’s
research is impressive for both its scale and breadth. Over
the last 14 years he has published
28 articles in refereed journals, in addition to numerous
reviews, chapters
in books, and papers in conference proceedings.
What interests him? Nearly everything. A casual dinner conversation
can
launch him into an obsessional quest as he strips
off layers of chaff,
arriving a few core questions that might conceivably
be settled with data. Then comes the quest for data, the
beloved Mac,
and the econometric models. (Never mind that the
conversation was
about the chaff.)
Mike has published papers on topics ranging from
discrimination in Baseball Hall of Fame voting
to trade liberalization
and productivity growth in Latin America. Reading
his papers, you
can learn what
happens to undergraduate dance majors, the
costs and benefits of debt rescheduling, and the publication
patterns of liberal
arts faculties in different fields. What fuels
this
large, continuous research agenda? First, Mike
is insatiably
curious. Second, he
is an enormously skilled applied econometrician
with a large panoply of techniques ready to use, and
a
willingness to learn
more should the question call for it. Finally,
he is an
enormously generous and good-humored colleague.
Mike is one of those rare people who are not
only extremely productive themselves, but around
whom
others work
better. He shares his
work, and his knowledge, and his talent. He
seeks others and is sought as a collaborator.
He has published
jointly
with
almost half the present and recent members
of our economics department.
His colleagues attest to the sheer joy he takes
in his subject and the fun it is to work with
him. He
is, to
coin a phrase,
a catalytic research scholar.
There are recurring themes in Mike’s work. One probes the
existence of racial or gender discrimination in various contexts.
Such work is painstaking, as it requires rigorous examination
of possible confounding factors. Carefully specifying what else
could be associated with differences in the academic salaries
of men and women of various racial backgrounds, he and Jim Monks
found that there are still unexplained residuals that may be
the result of discriminatory or preferential treatment. With
Monks and Arna Desser, he looked for evidence of discrimination
in the balloting for the Baseball Hall of Fame. They modeled
career achievements associated with players’ nomination
and election and found “a preference
in placing white players on the ballot
and a strong
voting
bias against both
African Americans
and Latin Americans in Hall of Fame balloting.”
Another
interest of Mike’s is higher education.
He and Jim Hartley have authored a series
of articles on faculty
research
at liberal arts colleges. They have uncovered
a two-tiered pattern with most publications
written by faculty at a small
number of
colleges. They also have identified a positive
relationship between the amount of faculty
research at an institution
and the number
of its students going to graduate school.
With Monks, he has used the college as a case study
in the effects of making
the
submission of SAT scores optional. Their,
as yet
unpublished, paper was presented at a prestigious
National Bureau of Economic
Research conference.
A third interest is labor economics, both
on an international and a microeconomic
level. A recent
article with
Eva Paus examines the connection between
neoliberal
openness
policies
and productivity
growth in Latin American manufacturing.
Two earlier papers asked about the effects of
trade liberalization
on real
wages. With
Sally Montgomery, he has studied the work
lives of artists. Both visual and performing
artists
routinely
divide their
time between
low paid art employment and much better
compensated non-art work. They ask what affects artists’ career
decisions and whether they respond as economic
theory would predict
to changes in the
relative returns to their art and non-art
work.
Mike’s infectious enthusiasm for tackling economic problems
and econometric modeling extends not just to his colleagues,
but to his students who consistently rave about his teaching.
He has taught outside the department in the college’s quantitative
reasoning course, contributing several case studies to it. His
patience, good humor, and expert advice have guided generations
of independent students. His service to the College has been
second to none. His rigorous modeling of entering classes has
greatly enhanced Mount Holyoke’s
admissions process, and his exuberant irreverence
prevents
us from taking ourselves
too
seriously. We are a better place because
of Mike. To paraphrase Falstaff in Henry IV,
Part II: Mike is not only witty in
himself, but the cause that wit is in other men.
Brad Leithauser and Mary Jo Salter
Can one member of
the Mount Holyoke faculty produce nine volumes of poetry, six
novels, a collection
of essays,
four editions,
countless reviews and readings, and two accomplished
daughters, all before turning fifty? In truth,
no: we are an energetic
faculty, but even one person of prodigious
gifts couldn’t
combine such productivity with full-time
teaching. Mary Jo Salter and
Brad Leithauser share a single unusual full-time
lectureship; each teaches half time; each
writes continually; each wins
international recognition for extraordinary
achievement; and both bring a powerful
intellectual and literary presence to our
students and substantial glory to our College. So far
as the present speaker knows,
despite their joint appointment, their only
collaborative production
is the two daughters.
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Brad Leithauser is
polymathic and omnigeneric. Trained as a lawyer at Harvard,
he turned
to a different
kind of writing,
and has
thus far published six novels and four
collections of poems, all from Knopf. Among his awards
have been an
Ingram Merrill
fellowship in poetry, an Amy Lowell Poetry
Traveling Scholarship, a Guggenheim, and
a Macarthur Foundation “genius grant.” Brad’s
poems, novels and essays reveal some quirky obsessions—Iceland,
light verse, American popular music, ghost stories—as well
as his deep engagement with natural history. Darlington’s
Fall (2002), a verse novel about an entomologist, won high praise
from such pulpits as the New York Review
of Books and The New
York Times, which selected it as one of the year’s notable
books. Brad’s preface gives the flavor
both of the book and of his mind:
I looked for dailiness and rootedness—for verse with the
firm calendars and solid place names, the ingrained habits and
incremental persuasions and erosions, which the novel has typically
found congenial. I wanted specificity. Although the characters
within these pages—including the narrator—are fictions,
in nearly every case I’ve tried to get the science right.
(If the people are fabricated, I’d
like to think the insects are genuine.)
Mary Jo Salter focuses simultaneously
on poetry and on Mount Holyoke. She teaches
a range of
courses
including (naturally)
verse writing, but also Pasts and Presences,
courses on contemporary poetry, and a
seminar
on the plays
of
Tom
Stoppard. Her honors
students have produced work of great
distinction for which she should take
some credit. In
Open Shutters, her most
recent collection
of poems, she writes,
What
a strange job I have—supplying
people with meter and metaphors!
I could be trying to write poems.
Instead, I’ve tried improving yours—
the ones about your grandmothers dying,
your cats, your broken homes,
your clueless junior years in Europe;
vainly I’ve tried to quash the onset
of another sonnet on a sunset.
But once past its wry beginning, the
poem, called “Office Hours,” goes
on to celebrate her students, Amanda and Diane, as
her “buddies” in
the common enterprise of taking pains to write well.
Coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry,
sometime poetry editor of The New
Republic, winner of
Ingram Merrill,
Guggenheim, and Amy Lowell Fellowships, regular fellow
at the MacDowell Colony, author of five volumes of
poetry, and a book
for
children, Mary Jo
enacts an
extraordinary fusion of professional celebrity and
on-campus commitment. Joyfully wedded, and jointly
appointed, she and Brad Leithauser
enrich the artistic and
intellectual life of the Mount Holyoke community.
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