U. announces this year's Lindback, Provost's awards

Members of the faculty get to judge their students with every exam, term paper and pop quiz, but rarely do the tables get turned. On Thursday, however, the University community will honor this year's eight Lindback Award winners -- chosen by a committee of students and previous award winners -- for excellence in teaching. Two faculty members will also be recognized with Provost's Awards. Each award comes with $3,000 in prize money. According to Terri Conn, executive assistant to the vice provost for University life, the independent Lindback Foundation has annually honored tenured faculty members for their teaching since 1961. Half of the eight awards are allotted to professors in the University's four health-related schools -- Nursing, Medical, Dental and Veterinary -- while four are given in the University's other undergraduate and graduate schools. In the health care fields, this year's winners are Nursing Professor Sarah Kagan and three physicians from the Medical School: Gastroenterology Professor Gary Lichtenstein, Pediatrics Professor Karin McGowan and Pathology Professor Steven Spitalnik. The Lindback winners from among the University's eight other schools are Law Professor Seth Kreimer, Operations and Information Management Professor Lorin Hitt, Materials Science Professor Peter Davies and Communications Professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication. The two Provost's Awards are given by the provost to honor instructors who are not members of the standing faculty and teach at the University on a "part time or affiliated basis," Conn explained. The honorees this year are Nursing lecturer Patricia Dunphy and Lorene Cary, who teaches creative writing with the University's English Writing Program. Davies, who has been teaching at Penn since 1983, saw the award as recognition for his sympathetic teaching style. "I know that the things I teach are extremely difficult for my students," he said of his chemistry and thermodynamics classes. "I strive desperately to try to make it simple for them." "It's primarily showing the students you care," he noted. Spitalnik said the award also recognized his department's emphasis on teaching. "You hear all this stuff about how this is a research institution and that students don't matter," he said. "These awards try to emphasize that teaching really does matter." Spitalnik added that he plans on investing his prize money into a fund for his 18-year-old son, a freshman at Princeton University. Conn emphasized that the student body played a large role in determining the Lindback recipients from the "large number of nominees." "Almost all of our candidates were nominated by students," she said. "What we were looking for were letters from students talking about not just activities in the classroom but a long-term impact on their lives." The Lindback Foundation gives awards not just at Penn, but at other schools in the Delaware Valley, including Temple, Bryn Mawr, Villanova and Juniata.