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.
2009 Metcalf Award Winner
Peter Edward Busher
Professor Peter Edward Busher has introduced literally thousands of students to the wonders of science. For over 25 years, he has taught basic courses in natural science to students who may be science phobic--and only fulfilling requirements. He considers this teaching to be a challenge, but also an opportunity to educate consumers and voters of the future in complex scientific issues.
Professor Busher engages students in topics in biology, evolution, enviornmental science, astronomy, and physics. Together they explore tentative answers to the most fundamental questions about our world, answers that he warns may become obsolete with the next scientific revolution. He relishes interdisciplinary connections and enriches his teaching with his own research. His long-term study of beaver population patterns and behavior provides valuable data and has brought him international renown. Professor Busher grapples with complicated issues raised by the relationship between wildlife and civilization; for instance, beavers greatly benefit the enviornment, but also greatly inconvenience the human population. His expertise helps shape wildlife policy development, an increasingly important endeavor worldwide.
Professor Busher states, "I care about my students, I care about their learning, and I am passionate about the body of knowledge I attempt to communicate." His goal is to engender in his students caring and passion for the natural world to inform and enrich their scientific views. The students praise him as "widly enthusiastic," "a fascinating and brilliant professor," "the best science professor I have ever had." One smitten student declared "I love Busher and beavers." "Great moustache!" said another. Interestingly, a number of students recommended that he receive a rais! The caring is obviously mutual.
Scientific missionary, dedicated teacher, and committed researcher, Professor Busher inspires further consideration of issues in natural science. Boston University proudly presents Professor Busher with the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching.
2008 Metcalf Award Winners
T. Jefferson Kline
Professor T. Jefferson Kline has inspired generations of students by his informed passion for French literature and cinema. He has devoted four decades to teaching-for the last thirty years, at Boston University. Whether instructing undergraduate classes or graduate seminars, advising and mentoring students and colleagues, sharing his expertise with high school teachers and faculty members at other universities, or publishing seminal articles and books, Professor Kline is always the consummate teacher. In his words, a life without teaching is unthinkable, and his teaching, infused with an irrepressible joie de vivre, has enriched countless lives.
A colleague wrote that Professor Kline "wants to share life, he wants to make a difference." He does this by making connections. He uses film as a way of connecting with students-a means of capturing the imagination of those who have been brought up in a culture dominated by visual images, and of leading them toward the written word, toward critical analysis, toward a wider cultural horizon where they can get to know their own and other languages and cultures much better. He wants to help his students interpret great film and great literature and critically decipher the omnipresent visual messages infiltrating their lives. He wants to change the way they look at the world.
Professor Kline is a gifted teacher, passionate about his subject matter, engaging, and entertaining. Who else would (or could) leap onto a desk or chair while reciting French poetry? "He makes us laugh and learn," one student said. But another observed: "Though his teaching exuded the freshness and humor of improvisation, I have since realized that it was the result of fastidious planning. He dedicated so much time to course preparation and structure." Yet another wrote: "Learning really should be an exchange of passions and this is how it is in this class." The most frequent evaluation: "Professor Kline is one of the best professors I have ever had."
Valued colleague, compassionate mentor, and dynamic and inspirational teacher, Boston University proudly presents Professor T. Jefferson Kline the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching. Merci mille fois.
Andrew Kull
Professor Andrew Kull has transformed the first-year Contracts course in law school from a dry requirement to an exciting and thought-provoking initiation into the legal field. He combines fascinating stories of human nature, the facts, and memorable lessons in "how to think like a lawyer." He invariably introduces a new case with the question, "Where are we when the curtain rises?" and then explores the pertinent details. Whether it be the frumpy little old lady who confused a diamond for a topaz, or the woman of ill-repute scheming in the fur salon of Saks Fifth Avenue, this background sheds light on the incentives and motivations of the parties concerned. Students are then well prepared to examine the judicial opinions on the case and analyze the legal issues that helped to shape them. Professor Kull's Contracts course is simultaneously instruction in deals, payments, ethics, restitution, maritime law, financial history, Red Sox baseball, and life itself. A prolific, prize-winning author, Professor Kull is at the forefront of the study of restitution law in the United States and through his teaching provides his students with rare legal insights.
One Student wrote: "Professor Kull cares little for matters of procedure-he wants the facts, and he wants the human tragicomedy behind them. The first twenty minutes of a 'Kulltracts' class are, far and away, the most entertaining of any in the Law Tower, as he manages to find a Hollywood screenplay in every dry offer and acceptance." Another student commented: "He is extremely approachable, and, even though he is a brilliant scholar, he is first and foremost a teacher. It's clear he teaches because he loves to; he is what every scholarly law professor should aspire to be-gifted, lovable, humorous, and kind man who desires nothing more than the best for his students."
With his groundbreaking research, his valuable upper-level course, and especially his engaging Contracts course, Professor Kull has enriched the legal field and all of his students. Boston University proudly presents Professor Andrew Kull with the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching.
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."
