Rutgers' Barry Qualls Named New Jersey Professor of the Year

NEW BRUNSWICK/PISCATAWAY, N.J. Barry V. Qualls, one of the most respected and beloved professors at Rutgers University, has added another major award to his distinguished list of accomplishments: He has been named the 2006 New Jersey Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE).

Qualls, a 35-year veteran professor of English literature and the interim vice president for undergraduate education on the New Brunswick/Piscataway campus, joins professors from other states honored for their extraordinary dedication to teaching undergraduate students and their influence on teaching. Recipients are selected by panels of professors, deans, education writers, students and representatives from government, educational foundations and associations.

Qualls, a resident of Highland Park, has devoted his career to undergraduate education at Rutgers, where he is a popular professor admired for his teaching and mentoring work. From 2004 until earlier this year he chaired the Task Force on Undergraduate Education, a group of faculty, staff and students appointed by President Richard L. McCormick to thoroughly examine and then reorganize undergraduate education at Rutgers New Brunswick/Piscataway campus.

Following a year of meetings, discussions and open forums across the Rutgers community, Qualls and his colleagues authored Transforming Undergraduate

Education, a report of the task forces recommendations for change, in July 2005. Last March, the universitys Board of Governors approved President McCormicks recommendations to transform undergraduate education, which generally endorsed the task forces proposals with some modifications. Qualls now sits on the implementation committee that is overseeing the changes.

Dr. Qualls is the single best citizen of Rutgers University, McCormick wrote in nominating Qualls for the award last spring. He stands out as one of the most dedicated, committed and well-respected teachers at the university and as its most eloquent faculty spokesperson in promoting continuous improvements in the level of

undergraduate education.

In addition to his administrative responsibilities, Qualls continues to teach undergraduate classes in 19th-century British literature. He also has taught seminars for high school teachers focusing on teaching, Victorian fiction, Victorian poetry, the Bible as literature and women writers. He is a former chair of the New Jersey Council for

the Humanities.

Qualls is well known and liked by students for his skillful explications of Victorian novels and a gentle insistence that students learn to pay close attention to language in literary works and in their own writing. Through the years he has mentored many students and trained them to lead classroom discussions. Among them was Christiane Gannon, a 2005 graduate of Douglass College who is now a graduate student in English at Johns Hopkins University.

As I continue to develop as a teacher, I find myself practicing a style of teaching that emulates Professor Qualls, she wrote, in recommending him for the prize. He has taught me that thorough research and exposing the students to many different styles of argumentations and interpretation are central to knowledgeable and inspired teaching. He has also taught me, by example, that creating a space of equality between student and

teacher is what makes education so powerful, and that teaching (and learning) is about an exchange of knowledge, not a hierarchical passing down and facts and correct answers.

Qualls himself agrees that his career has been driven by a passion for the on-campus experiences possible for students at a research university with wonderful resources

like those at Rutgers. Born in Appalachia in eastern Kentucky and educated central Florida,Qualls said he had found the resources of his undergraduate school, Florida State University, well-nigh magical. When he came to Rutgers in 1971, he was determined to spark and nurture in his own students the same passion for education. Qualls has chaired three universitywide committees that have addressed that challenge, culminating in the Task Force on Undergraduate Education.

Transforming undergraduate education a national priority, at least in the rhetoric

we hear seems actually to be occurring at Rutgers, Qualls said. Faculty and students seem determined to create the connections and develop the dialogues that make some unifying sense of the multitude of educations that John Dewey confronted in 1915.

For me, good teaching the ability to excite students about the material and provoke them to go beyond classroom presentations, and to think and read beyond the syllabus is central to the undergraduates experience of a research university,

Qualls said.

But thats only half the matter. I think equally important, for all students, are advising and mentoring. Advisers help students discover the resources of Rutgers (and they are so immense that advisers essentially provide a map to students); they help them think about how course choices complement each other; they make them aware of the importanceof planning a curriculum, not just taking courses. A mentor does even more: She or he works with the student from the time they get acquainted to think about course choices in the context of other campus academic choices study abroad, honors work, for example in the context of career possibilities.

The most recent Rutgers recipient of the New Jersey Professor of the Year award was mathematics professor Stephen J. Greenfield, in 2004. Clement A. Price, a history professor at Rutgers-Newark, was honored as New Jersey Professor of the Year in 1999.

Two Rutgers faculty have won CASEs national Professor of the Year award: Francine Essien, a biology professor at Rutgers Cook College in Piscataway, in 1994, and the late Charles Pine, a professor of physics at Rutgers-Newark for 39 years, in 1984.

The Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) is a professional organization that supports education by working in fundraising, communications and alumni relations to advance and support education worldwide. It began national and state Professors of the Year awards in 1981. The Carnegie Foundation began funding the program in 1994.

Contact: Patricia Lamiell

732-932-7084, ext. 615

E-mail: plamiell@ur.rutgers.edu