Teaching award choices for SAS will be delayed

The committee charged with choosing winners of the School of Arts and Sciences prestigious Ira Abrams teaching award has recommended the award not be presented this year. However, SAS officials say the choice is probably only delayed and the committee is reconsidering its decision -- which will now be over a month late. The Ira Abrams Awards for Distinguished Teaching are the school's highest teaching honor and include a $1,000 prize. The winners are generally named in mid-April. The four-person committee failed to recommend any of this year's five faculty nominees in its report to SAS Dean Hugo Sonnenschein last month. The decision has led to speculation that nominees were not sufficiently qualified for the honor. An official in the dean's office denied such speculation and said the committee, made up of three faculty members and one undergraduate, will meet again later this month. According to College junior Lara Nicolayevsky, the committee's student representative, the group has met only once. She also said the committee's decision not to recommend winners had nothing to do with the quality of the nominees. The three faculty members who are on the committee -- English Professor Peter Conn, Chemistry Professor Madeleine Joullie and History Professor Bruce Kuklick -- would not comment on their report or future meetings. Conn said, however, that he would probably be out of the country when any additional meetings take place. Sonnenschein said he had only "casual contact" with committee members, but said outside pressure or divided opinion among committee members may have led to the decision to hold further meetings. "The possibility of them coming up with a name at this point is not precluded by what they said to me before," Sonnenschein said. "But I'm not suggesting that they will." Nicolayevsky said the report's recommendation arose from questions over what the award represents, rather than concerns about the candidates themselves. "There were a few question we were asking that prevented us from making a decision," Nicolayevsky said. "But it's not a reflection on the candidates themselves." "We were asking questions about the award and what it should represent," she added. "I guess it hasn't been rehashed in a few years." Nicolayevsky said the committee's discussions were confined to a lunch meeting which took place after each member had separately reviewed recommendations and teaching records of the five professors nominated for the award. The SAS dean's office solicited nominations in early February. Last year's recipients, Physics Professor Walter Wales and German Professor Horst Daemmrich, would not speculate on the delay, saying they were unaware of the decision-making process for this year's awards. Wales, however, did say he was "surprised" that winners have not been named.

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