Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching
Overview
The Metcalf Awards are given annually to one or more finalists in the competition for the Metcalf Cup and Prize. The winners of the Metcalf Awards each receive $5,000.
"The Metcalf Awards for Excellence in Teaching express Boston University's understanding of the centrality of teaching in higher education," President Emeritus Jon Westling has stated.
"A university is many things: an active tradition of inquiry, attentiveness, respect for the past and the future, a struggle to comprehend the world and the ideas we have of it, and a community defined by its open-ended debates."
Teaching is what elevates and unifies these diverse elements and brings them directly into the lives of students. By recognizing and encouraging outstanding teaching, the Metcalf Awards express Boston University's deepest purpose.
Each fall, the Metcalf Committee invites students, faculty members, and alumni to submit letters recommending current full-time faculty members for consideration for the Metcalf Awards.
2007 Metcalf Award Winners
Penelope Bitzas
The Greeks have always known that music tempers our character. In Plato's Timaeus, Socrates scolds those who believe music is merely a fount of irrational pleasure. He testifies instead to music's power, especially when sung by the human voice. The Muses gave mankind music, Socrates claims, that we may "correct any discord which may have risen in the courses of the soul."
Attentive to the musical, intellectual, and spiritual needs
of each of her opera students, Professor Bitzas has proved faithful to the wisdom of the ancients.
Professor Bitzas first carefully matches the voices of students to their proper repetoire. Does a soprano have a lively presence or a strong middle range? She may be a "soubrette", suited for Mozart's Papagena, but perhaps lacking the range and power for Wagner's Isolde. One student remembers that Professor Bitzas saved her career by "rediscovering her true voice", turning her from a struggling dramatic soprano into a prize-winning mezzo.
An operatic voice does not merely sing but also conveys a character in the heat of a theatrical role. With exacting passion, Professor Bitzas, leads her students through the dramatic upheavals that their soaring arias convey. She insists on proper enuciation and pronunciation of texts in their original tongue, development of muscular support needed to sustain the voice, as well as proper posture, dress, and comportant. Professor Bitzas drills her students in "the technical and mechanical aspects of singing, of which she has an encyclopedic knowledge," then "assesses technical, musical, and artistic merits and deficiencies." Once convinced of a student's professional competence, Professor Bitzas shops the student's talent with the zeal of a Hollywood agent.
Aware that some important lessons are learned only under the pressure of the stage, Professor Bitzas conscientiously attends her students' rehersals and performances. This becomes increasingly difficult as her students now perform in opera houses from Boston and New York to Chicago, San Francisco, Minnesota, and Santa Fe.
Eric P. Widmaier
The human body amazes all who consider its intricacy and harmony. How does cortisol prevent the proliferation of T-cells by rendering them immune to interleukin-1? How could the removal of one carbon atom change testosterone to estrogen? And, as our award winner once titled a book for general readers, Why Don't Geese Get Obese?
When teaching Systems Physiology, one of the Biology Department's largest classes, Professor Widmaier is willing to answer queries at every level of analysis and detail. "It is particularly gratifying," he writes, "to know that students of any discipline who take my physiology courses are empowered with information about their bodies, their health, and the latest biomedical research."
The lead author of Vander's Human Physiology, the authoritative textbook of his field, Professor Widmaier has unparalleled mastery of biological mechanisms and their dizzying interconnections. His erudition is matched only by the rigor of his teaching, animated with meticulous delight. Even in his large lecture class, one student remembers, "Professor Widmaier would always begin by asking whether anyone had questions...After all questions were thoroughly answered, he would begin teaching new material." Another student praises his "amazing talent" for "knowing exactly when to diverge into an interesting clinical application." "Thanks to him," a student writes, "I'll always remember how Gatorade was developed by a nephrologist who measured the electrolyte composition of sweat wrung from the jerseys of Florida football players."
Professor Widmaier is just as rigorous and engaging in his laboratory. "I had never worked in a lab before my arrival at BU," writes a former student now researching for a major pharmaceutical firm. "Dr. Widmaier taught me every technique himself." Another student, now an award-winning endrocrinologist, remembers the "countless times Professor Widmaier enquired about the status of a project, offered advice, and prepared me for presentations."
