The Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching The University’s Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching were presented during the 452d convocation on June 13, 1998. Upon the recommendation of John W. Boyer, Dean of the College, and Geoffrey R. Stone, Provost, Hugo F. Sonnenschein, President, designated the following winners.
Steven Levitt, Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics and the College.
Presentation by Lars Peter Hansen, the Homer J. Livingston Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Economics and the College. Steve Levitt arrived at the University of Chicago this past fall. His colleagues knew well his outstanding research, which contributed to our understanding of a wide array of social and political phenomena. We did not, however, fully appreciate what an exceptional teacher he would be. His first course on the Economics of Crime stimulated students in a way that I have not seen previously in an undergraduate economics class. Not only did he succeed in conveying a basic knowledge of economics and statistics; he confronted his students with first-hand information about gangs, crime, and police protection. Moreover, Steve approached his class with creative flare. For instance, as part of learning about the influence of gangs on inner-city youth, Steve arranged for his students to converse with students from DuSable High School about a variety of social issues. Not only did the high school students visit Steve’s classroom, but Steve also took some of his students to visit DuSable High School. This experience led them to a new appreciation for the problems of youth growing up in neighborhoods susceptible to the influences of street gangs. As evidence for the profound impact of Steve’s class, I would like to quote from one of his students:
The information I was taught was refreshingly useful. A purely theoretical discourse would not have sufficed in the course as it will not suffice in the real world. Rather, we were taught to fuse theory with data, to think qualitatively as well as quantitatively in search of tangible policy solutions to existing social problems.
Mr. President, it is my great honor to present Steven Levitt for the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
Joseph A. Piccirilli, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Chemistry; Assistant Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Presentation by Bernard S. Strauss, Professor in the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, the Committee on Genetics, and the College. Professor Piccirilli works at the interface between chemistry and biology on the type of RNA molecules which led to structures we now recognize to be the first living things. RNA, ribonucleic acid, can have the properties of a catalyst or enzyme, a role formerly ascribed exclusively to the proteins. It is Dr. Piccirilli’s goal to understand how this catalytic activity comes about. He uses the methodology of organic chemistry to substitute single atoms at key RNA positions, thereby changing its ability to interact with metal ions in ways which throw light on the detailed mechanisms of catalysis. It is the experience of molecular biologists for over a century that any deep understanding of their subject must involve both the concepts and tools of physical science. It is also the experience of biologists that the importance and excitement of physical science are difficult to transmit to students anxious to confront the complexities of cells and organisms. Dr. Piccirilli overcomes this difficulty. His students respond to his enthusiasm and commitment to his subject and his obvious understanding of its relevance to the study of living things. Undergraduates want to work in his laboratory. They applaud his lectures and his empathy with their problems as he works with them to enhance their understanding. We require that our young faculty demonstrate their prowess as scholars. It is the working premise of our collegiate life that outstanding scholarship and inspired teaching can and should go together. The activities of scholars such as Dr. Piccirilli validate that belief. It is, therefore, a great pleasure for me to present Dr. Joseph A. Piccirilli, Assistant Professor in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Assistant Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
Allen R. Sanderson, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics and the College; Senior Research Scientist, National Opinion Research Center.
Presentation by Norman M. Bradburn, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Psychology, the Graduate School of Business, the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, and the College; Senior Vice-President for Research, National Opinion Research Center. Allen Sanderson is an economist and teacher with an uncommon ability to lead his students through material that had seemed opaque and bring them to understand how that same material illuminates the world and clarifies the choices open to them and to society. As an economist with broad interests and as a senior scientist at the National Opinion Research Center, he brings his clarifying intelligence and wide learning to bear on seemingly ordinary but nevertheless vital aspects of human life. As a teacher he goes a step further. His lucid lectures, his challenging classes on the fundamentals of micro- and macroeconomics, and his direct concern for learning changes students’ lives. Quarter after quarter, his students report how much, and how unexpectedly, Allen’s economics courses contributed to their College education and to their preparation for a future in graduate work or in the marketplace. One student recently thanked him for a course that expanded her interests and perspectives and then said: “Thank you, thank you, thank you for teaching me about interest rates—I quite literally would not have won a Rhodes Scholarship without that knowledge.” Another student says: “I didn’t earn an A in Econ. 199, but I learned more about how our country works than I have ever known before. Thank you for making me a more informed citizen.” Allen Sanderson’s teaching and research contributes to the lives of his students and to the life of the nation and the world through those students. No more powerful argument for the importance of a liberal education in a research university can be found than in the evidence for these claims to be found in the testimony of Allen’s students. Mr. President, it is an honor for me to present Allen R. Sanderson for the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
Laura M. Slatkin, Associate Professor in the Department of Classical Languages & Literatures, the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World, and the College.
Presentation by Peter White, Professor in the Departments of Classical Languages & Literatures and New Testament & Early Christian Literature, the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World, and the College. Laura Slatkin, interpreter and teacher of Greek poetry, in her five years at the University of Chicago has drawn proselytes in increasing numbers to the oldest literature of Europe. “She loves her work,” one student has written, “and works deliriously to convey her love and knowledge to us.” “Feverish,” if not “delirious,” is a word that truly describes the style of her engagement. First-year students she assails with drill sheets, handouts, comic strips, stories, and sermonettes. She holds a prodigious number of office hours and insists that everyone touch base with her. She is a patient adviser and a shrewd estimator of students’ strengths and needs. As their linguistic skills improve, her proteges come to perceive the literary intelligence for which Laura’s publications are so much admired by fellow-scholars. In still hard-to-translate lines of Greek, she shows them patterns and graces that they did not suspect and holds them rapt. “Her teaching,” one said, “was entirely her own.” In reading groups and conversations, she coaxes students forward, promising to lead them to that Blessed Island where Homer, Hesiod, and Sophocles will at last be heard and understood, speaking in their own marvelous tongue. Yet even those students who praise Laura Slatkin most can scarcely guess what effort she devotes to them that they do not see. She is the champion of their accomplishments to her colleagues. She is a painstaking writer of letters that convey them to the grant, the graduate program, or the job which is the next door in their lives. She shares her friends with them, and has friends to whom to send them everywhere. Laura has been one of the true Socratics among us, for whom friendship is the foundation and the endpoint of the teaching art.
Stephen M. Stigler, the Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Statistics, the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science, and the College.
Presentation by Peter McCullagh, the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor in the Department of Statistics and the College. Stephen Stigler has been known for the clarity of his writing, for the excellence of his teaching, and for his dedication to undergraduate education at the University for nearly twenty years. Whether his presentation is to an undergraduate class in an elementary-level course or to a research audience of statisticians or historians of science, Stigler’s lectures are invariably an exhibit of the master craftsman, scholarly, well-researched, informative, and enter-taining. Anecdotes are to the statistician as experiments are to the chemist, and Stigler is the master of the well-crafted, aptly chosen anecdote. The preferred form is one that takes an unexpected, amusing, and therefore memorable twist at the end to demolish the accepted wisdom. When such a tale is delivered with the skill of a master storyteller, and with the relish of an academic showing that a plausible argument espoused by Professor X is utter nonsense, the result is memorable, entertaining, and educational. Students get the point and they frequently remember it. The famous law of eponymy, the law that states that no idea in science is ever named after its original discoverer, is rightly called Stigler’s Law. This is a law with which it is difficult to quarrel: to do so is to suggest that Stigler is perhaps the original discoverer, and that is, of course, patently false as the law itself predicts. Stephen Stigler evidently takes great delight in ironies of this sort and uses similar devices to great advantage in the classroom to explain the intricacies of statistical reasoning. Mr. President, it is my great honor to present Stephen Stigler for the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
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