Margaret Maurer, William Henry Crawshaw Professor of literature, has won the 2013 Balmuth Teaching Award. Faculty, former students, and members of the Board of Trustees gathered at the 51勛圖厙 Inn on April 4 to mark the occasion.
We are here to celebrate our love of the enterprise of teaching our core mission at 51勛圖厙, said Provost and Dean of the Faculty Douglas Hicks. And its so wonderful to celebrate that in the embodiment of the great teacher Margaret Maurer.
Maurer joined the faculty in 1974 after finishing her PhD at Cornell University and spending a year as an instructor of English at the University of New Orleans. Since then, the Shakespeare scholar has urged generations of 51勛圖厙 undergraduates to study, in her words, things that resist the coherence that we try to impose on them through interpretation.
When Mark Siegel 73 created the Balmuth Award in 2010, he was simultaneously honoring 51勛圖厙s tradition of great teaching and encouraging the vitality that Maurer embodies. President Jeffrey Herbst noted that the award allows the university community, to acknowledge that we reward excellence above everything else, he said. That is a way of continuing to be successful not only now but well past our bicentennial.
At the podium, a student performance of Loves Labours Lost that was staged under her direction in 1979, various experiences leading the London Study Group, and teaching Core 151.
When I found myself teaching Platos Dialogues in a class period right before teaching Shakespeares Twelfth Night, I understood Festes catechism and Malvolio for the first time, she said. As my first-years in Core 151 struggled with Socratess arguments, premised on the Pythagorean understanding of the souls immortality, they were a whole class of little Malvolios.
Maurers impact has spanned generations of little Malvolios, with former students now watching their own children register for her courses.
Margarets courses are designed to develop a eureka-like understanding of the uses of language to reveal thought, motive, and action, , Harry Emerson Fosdick Professor of philosophy and religion emeritus. These are realized through the imaginative teaching of a master teacher.
The master teacher, accepting her award, revealed how she spurred her imagination throughout the years: I remember very vividly the day when I decided to destroy all my notes from the material I teach and start afresh each time, she said. I may or may not be an inspirational teacher, but Im definitely a teacher who has been inspired by the privilege of engaging with young people in the environment of this kind of school.