IUSB's Bender named Indiana's top prof

By Gail Mancini

Bender

Indiana University South Bend's Eileen Bender has been named Indiana Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. She is the first IU professor to receive the annual award, which was announced at a luncheon in Washington D.C., last Friday (Oct.22).

Bender is a professor of English at IUSB and director of the IU Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching (FACET), headquartered on the South Bend campus. She also has won both campus and university-wide awards for teaching excellence.

"Eileen Bender is a legend on our campus and, indeed, on all of the eight campuses in the Indiana University system," said Moya Andrews, acting vice chancellor and dean of the faculties on the IUB campus, 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 the 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."

Bender has been one of IUSB's primary academic innovators. She was one of the early supporters of gender studies, and 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 administrator, Bender developed the campus' SMART (Student/Mentor Academic Research Teams) program, which has groomed undergraduate researchers in numbers disproportionate to a campus IUSB's size.

In the community, her commitment to education has included membership on the South Bend Community School Board and St. Joseph County Library Board. She has been an appointee to two statewide committees--the Indiana Council for the Humanities, and the Governor's Committee on Adult and Migrant Education.

Read about Bender's take on the "virtual professor":
"Viewpoint" (Home Pages, Sept. 13, 1996)

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