UW-Green Bay announces Founders Association Awards for Excellence
GREEN BAY – The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay today (Tuesday, Aug. 26) announced the recipients of the 2008 Founders Association Awards for Excellence.
Recipients of Founders Association Awards for Excellence are, from left: Prof. Andrew Kersten, Prof. Lucy Arendt, Sandy Bohman, Maria Hinton, Prof. Cliff Abbott, Stephanie Cataldo-Pabich (accepting on behalf of Cyndie Shepard), Mike Barry, and Paul Pinkston.
The awards for excellence and their recipients are: Teaching — Prof. Lucy Arendt; Institutional Development — Mike Barry; Classified Staff – Sandy Bohman; Scholarship — Prof. Andrew Kersten; Academic Support — Paul Pinkston; Community Outreach — Cyndie Shepard; and Collaborative Achievement — the Oneida Language Project of Prof. Cliff Abbott and Tribal Elder Maria Hinton.
UW-Green Bay Interim Chancellor David Ward and Founders Association President John Heugel presented the awards before an audience of approximately 500 at the annual UW-Green Bay Faculty and Staff Convocation at the University Union. The Founders Association, a philanthropic organization, began the awards program in 1975.
Arendt, recipient of the teaching award, is a professor of Business Administration who wins praise for combining expertise in the field — management and organizational behavior — with an ability to connect with students. Her teaching style is described as unusually interactive, involving group work, role playing, and sometimes the use of other media such as popular music or film clips to demonstrate concepts in her field. Her award citation noted that a colleague in UW-Green Bay’s Teaching Scholars group characterized her as a leader in faculty efforts to promote best practices in effective teaching, and called her a “’shining star’ among a constellation of stellar teachers.” Arendt is a UW-Green Bay alumna, having earned her bachelor’s in Business Administration and Spanish, and master’s in Administrative Science. She earned her Ph.D. in management science at UW-Milwaukee. She has taught courses at UW-Green Bay since the 1990s, and joined the faculty as a full-time lecturer in 2004 and as an assistant professor in 2006.
The recipient of the Founders Award for institutional development, Barry, is retiring this year after 15 years service with UW-Green Bay as its purchasing director and director of institutional support. Nominators praised Barry’s integrity, his strong sense of public accountability in a time of tight fiscal resources, and his leadership in helping implement more efficient and cost-effective procurement procedures and business systems. The citation noted that during Barry’s tenure the University successfully completed major construction projects with Mary Ann Cofrin Hall, the Kress Events Center and the Laboratory Sciences Building, along with significant remodeling to the University Union and Student Services Building, among others. Barry helped ensure that contracts were finalized and specialized equipment purchased and installed on time, within budget, in accordance with state policies.
Bohman, this year’s recipient of the Classified Staff Award for Excellence, is a library services assistant with the University’s Cofrin Library, with primary responsibility as the acquisitions supervisor. She was cited for her ability and dedication in tracking down and ordering books, videos and a variety of materials for use by professors, staff and students in their research and coursework. Colleagues praised her technical mastery in using the latest electronic search tools to locate rare, out-of-print or highly obscure works, navigating UW-Green Bay and the UW System collections as well as resources around the world. Bohman has been with the University’s library for 38 years. Since 1993, she has also managed the library’s Federal Depository Library Program.
Kersten, a historian and professor with the Social Change and Development academic unit, is a repeat recipient, having earned recognition for outstanding teaching in 2007. This year’s recognition in the category of scholarship and research reflects the fact that in just 11 years at UW-Green Bay he has published no fewer than six books, with a seventh forthcoming, as well as about forty articles, chapters, or encyclopedia entries and about thirty book reviews. He was also awarded an $800,000 grant to promote the study of history in Wisconsin. Kersten’s research has addressed issues in labor history, the law, race relations in mid-20th-century America, and the American home front in World War II. Kersten has been a member of the UW-Green Bay faculty since 1997, when he earned his Ph.D. in United States history from the University of Cincinnati.
Pinkston has the title of campus planner. He is based in the Office of Facilities Management and Planning. His Founders Award for Academic Support noted his detailed and far-sighted work as a planner, project manager and liaison on millions of dollars’ worth of major capital projects and ongoing initiatives since he assumed his current position in 2001. Nominators praised his capacity for flexibility, creativity and problem-solving in managing projects to maximize benefits for the University, its faculty, staff and students, and the general public. A graduate of UW-Green Bay in Urban and Regional Studies, he first joined the staff in 1989.
Cyndie Shepard joined UW-Green Bay in 2001 upon the appointment of her husband, Bruce, as UW-Green Bay chancellor. She served as an instructor in courses in education and in theatre arts, but perhaps became best known as a co-founder and director of the award-winning Phuture Phoenix Program. Seeing a need in her new community, Shepard shaped the new initiative to pair at-risk grade school students with college students. Since 2003, Phuture Phoenix has enabled about 5,000 fifth-graders to tour the UW-Green Bay campus and led to roughly 10,000 hours of tutoring in middle schools per year, by roughly 300 UW-Green Bay student tutors. Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle has praised the program for inspiring students to complete high school and pursue higher education; he also credited it as an inspiration for his Wisconsin covenant initiative. Cyndie Shepard, now at Western Washington University where her husband recently was appointed president, accepted the University Award for Excellence in Community Outreach via videotaped acceptance remarks.
The award for collaborative achievement honors Abbott, a linguist and professor who teaches courses in communication and First Nations Studies, and Hinton, an Oneida Tribal Elder who is one of a relative handful of surviving native speakers of Oneida. The two meet each week to make audio recordings of Hinton’s pronunciations for the first online, oral dictionary. (Their work, about halfway completed, is archived at www.uwgb.edu/Oneida/.) Hinton’s keen memory was critical to the Oneida Nation’s preserve-the-language movement rekindled in the 1970s. She and her brother, the late Amos Christjohn, collaborated to create the first written dictionary of the oral language. It was a desire to enhance her linguistic and teaching credentials that led her to earn a UW-Green Bay bachelor’s degree in Communication and the Arts in 1979, at age 68. Today, at 98, she is the University’s oldest living alumnus. She received a standing ovation when she stepped forward to receive her Founders Award plaque at the awards ceremony.
Recipients of the Founders Association Awards for Excellence are chosen by a committee of UW-Green Bay faculty and staff from responses to a call for nominations.
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