Harvard's
Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize
Harvard's Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching is awarded annually to a senior faculty member, to a junior faculty member, and to a teaching fellow. All Harvard undergraduates are invited to make nominations to the undergraduate council each year. Based on these, five or six nominees are selected as finalists in each category by a committee from the undergraduate council. A member of the undergraduate council argues the case for each finalist to the undergraduate council, which then selects the winner. The winner is announced at a dinner attended by the finalists, nominators, undergraduate council members, and representatives of the Levenson family.
Citation
for Professor Gerald Gabrielse
by
Erica Farmer of the Undergraduate Council, 1 May 2000
When many students come to Harvard,
they cite the quality of the professors here as one of the reasons they
chose
to attend. Senior faculty are often
seen as the “height” of what it is to be a Harvard professor, honored
as
groundbreaking in their fields, engaged in important research projects,
and
survivors of the University’s often brutal tenure process.
Yet, for many Harvard students, senior
faculty are also seen as too immersed in their own academic projects to
have
the time or initiative to care about their undergraduate students. Year after year, a stereotype is perpetuated
of the staid senior faculty member who is inaccessible and distant,
perhaps
teaching undergraduates, but largely unconcerned about who they are or
with
shaping their personal experiences.
Luckily, this conception is certainly not always the case, and
there
really are senior faculty members who connect with their undergraduate
students, are aware of their individual needs, and even inspire them,
as
evidenced by the many nominations our committee received in their honor.
The winner of this year’s senior
faculty award is a striking example of this concern for students. In many of the nominations, the nominators
highlight his patience and dedication to them, from arranging special
drop-in Office
Hours, scheduling field trips and tests to best accommodate their
schedules,
maintain communication, especially via email, and painstakingly
creating
colored transparencies and lecture note to enliven course material. But perhaps more telling than all of these,
are the reaction of his students to the course itself.
His course is part of the core curriculum,
and as such, consists of many students whose main interests and skills
are not
necessarily directed toward the subject matter. And
among these students, he has managed to, nonetheless, instill
a part of his passion and enthusiasm for his course.
One student writes “his dedication
seems like the most natural thing in the world for him.
He has put so much of himself into this
class that, if there were no Levenson award, we’d have to make up our
own award
to show him how grateful we are for everything he’s done all semester.” Another claims that she was amazed not only
that he spends hours preparing for an undergraduate lecture course but
that he
works so hard on a course whose students are not even science majors. These sentiments are echoed in the other
nominations, all of which praise this professor for going out of his
way to
make sure his students both enjoy and understand the material he
presents to
them. And these students, many of whom
expressed apprehension upon initially undertaking the course, are
likely to
leave it with a new appreciation for a subject which many admit to
having
previously viewed with antipathy and even hatred. In
sum, one of the nominations concludes, “All in all, this class
I really feared has turned out to be great, even for a science neophyte
like
myself. I’m learning real-world
information about how CD players, TVs, lasers, and nuclear power work,
and I
actually understand it. Yet I know if I
have questions, I won’t be afraid to seek help. And
that, I think, is as close to a perfect learning experience
as you can get.”
So, in honor of his dedication and enthusiasm for his students, the 2000 Joseph R. Levenson teaching prize goes to Prof. Gerald Gabrielse of Science A-45: Reality Physics.