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Carnegie Foundation names IUSB's Bender as the state's "Professor of the Year"
Oct. 22, 1999
A photo of Professor Bender is available for downloading from our Web site at http://newsinfo.iu.edu/OCM/photos/eileen_t.tif
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Indiana University South Bend Professor Eileen Bender has been named Indiana Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Bender is the first IU professor to receive this annual award, which was announced today (Oct. 22) at a luncheon in Washington, D.C.
Bender, a professor of English at IU South Bend, is a winner of IUSB's and IU's most prestigious teaching excellence awards. She is the all-Indiana University director of the Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching (FACET).
"Eileen Bender is a legend on our campus and, indeed, on all of the eight campuses in the IU system," said Moya L. Andrews, acting vice chancellor for academic affairs and acting dean of faculties for the IU Bloomington campus and professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, who nominated Bender for the award. "Her name is synonymous with teaching excellence, and she has created a community of scholars and practitioners of teaching that has invigorated and strengthened our entire academic community."
The Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) established the Professors of the Year program in 1981 and has developed it in cooperation with the Carnegie Foundation and various higher education associations. Bender was selected from among 420 nominees, including 11 from Indiana.
As an advocate for teaching excellence, Bender has challenged what she calls "the myth of the isolated professor, who performs incomparable feats of academic legerdemain behind the closed doors of the classroom."
"Undergraduate teaching, at its best, is not only an exercise in individual effort and skill, but the collective work of an interdependent, discursive, mutually-animating community learning together," Bender added.
Bender joined the IUSB faculty in 1985 after earning a doctorate in English from the University of Notre Dame. A full professor since 1993, she also has held university-wide positions as academic adviser to the president and associate dean of faculties.
Bender has been one of IUSB's primary academic innovators. She is credited as one of its early supporters of gender studies. As a teacher, she has developed and taught some of IUSB's first courses in early American women's fiction, Jewish fiction, African American and Hispanic literature, and Native American literature.
As an IUSB administrator, she developed the undergraduate research program known as SMART, which has groomed undergraduate researchers in numbers disproportionate to a campus the size of IUSB.
Her awards for teaching and distinguished service to higher education include the IU President's Medal, the all-IU Sylvia Bowman Distinguished Teaching Award, and the IUSB Lundquist Faculty Fellowship, the highest recognition bestowed by the IUSB faculty.
In South Bend, her commitment to community education has included terms as a member of the South Bend Community School Board and St. Joseph County Library Board. She has been an appointee to two statewide educational committees: the Indiana Council for the Humanities and the Governor's Committee on Adult and Migrant Education.
(Gail Mancini (IUSB), 219-237-4345, gmancini@indiana.edu or George Vlahakis (IUB), 812-855-0846, gvlahaki@indiana.edu)