University of Chicago faculty members are some of the world’s most celebrated scholars, with Nobel laureates, Pulitzers Prize winners and recipients of many other prestigious international awards to their credit.
But one of the most highly regarded awards bestowed upon faculty originated at the University itself—one they can only receive from the students they teach. Created in 1938, the student-nominated Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching is considered to be the nation’s oldest prize for undergraduate teaching and among the most treasured.
“The Quantrell is extremely meaningful because you know that it comes from the students, and the students are the people to whom I feel most accountable,” said Aden Kumler, AB’96, assistant professor in art history at the University. “So often at the end of a term, I have a profound feeling of thankfulness that the students have been in the classroom looking and talking with me. To know they've reciprocated that feeling will be one of the high points of my career,” she said.
“I’m quite a verbose person,” Kumler said, “and this makes me speechless.”
Fittingly, Kumler and fellow 2013 Quantrell recipients Christine Andrews, Jeffrey Harvey and Kristen Schilt received the awards alongside students receiving their diplomas at the College Diploma Ceremony on June 15, the day of spring Convocation.
Each Quantrell recipient also receives a $5,000 monetary prize. The award’s endowment was originally created with an anonymous gift to the University. The donor’s identity remained secret for more than a decade, but University Trustee Ernest Quantrell eventually added to his gift, consented to be acknowledged as the donor and named the award for his parents, Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell. In a 1952 issue of the University of Chicago Magazine, Quantrell described the motivation behind his gift.
“The success of a university depends on its product, and its product consists of students trained to lead happy, proficient, useful and unselfish lives,” Quantrell wrote. “To obtain this product, a good faculty is essential and constitutes the most important part of a university. We have had, and still have, great teachers, but we will have still greater ones.”
Christine Andrews, Senior Lecturer in the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division
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Andrews said she derives the greatest satisfaction from helping students add to their already impressive arsenal of intellectual skills. “At the University of Chicago, there are plenty of fantastic students, who make it a pleasure to teach here. The quality of our undergraduates, however, brings with it the temptation to reward the abilities a student comes to class with rather than those he or she learns along the way,” Andrews said.
“I want all of my students to see a grade of A as an attainable outcome—not only the student who comes in prepared to write a publishable paper, but also the one who arrives with less experience and fewer tools, but who works super hard to master new ideas and new skills. This means I need to be willing to work extensively with them, so I do my best to get to know my students and to be responsive, approachable, and available,” said Andrews, who coordinates labs for courses in evolution, ecology, and biodiversity. “Many students thank me for taking time to pick apart their writing and helping to put it back together. “Some report on graduate research projects inspired by a reading I assigned or a lecture I gave, and others send me links to articles years after they’ve graduated to make sure I’m keeping up on the literature they reviewed in papers they wrote for me.”
Jeffrey Harvey, the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Service Professor in Physics
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Harvey, who specializes in a broad range of topics, including string theory, particle theory, mathematical physics and cosmology, agreed. “[University of Chicago students] are just very excited to be learning things, even if these things are difficult and challenging. I get a lot of positive reinforcement from their being excited and engaged,” Harvey said.
“In this quantum mechanics course, I think it’s really the first time that they encounter some of the physics that is both very powerful in explaining how the world works and also just extremely mysterious and bizarre. There’s this fuzzy world of probabilities: Nothing is sure. Things behave in ways that don’t fit with our intuition, and it's fantastic to be able to confront them with that and actually show them how the calculations work.”
Aden Kumler, Assistant Professor in Art History and the College
Kumler credited much of her teaching success to the professors she learned from herself as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. She fondly recalls the late Michael Camille’s ability to instill a palpable sense of excitement about medieval art; Bernard McGinn’s willingness to co-advise her somewhat unorthodox BA project; Françoise Meltzer’s seminar courses that showed how hard questioning can be the biggest sign of respect; and Anne Robertson’s ability to convey the subtle, complex aspects of medieval musical practice and theory to students without “dumbing it down” in any way.
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“I still feel deeply connected to my undergrad experience, not least because I’m walking the same campus I walked, and I have the luxury of having colleagues who shaped me intellectually as an undergraduate,” she said.
Kumler said her most powerful teaching tool is getting students to talk as much as possible. “When the students are engaged, they produce insights that change the way I see works of art or monuments that I have been looking at for most of my life. Students will routinely say and write things that are completely original. “The other thing I would say is that you cannot set the bar high enough,” Kumler said.
“I don’t mean by being draconian,” she said, “or assigning too much reading—which I’m sure I do—but simply that you should go to class prepared for them to impress you, and they will.”
Kristen Schilt, Assistant Professor in Sociology
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Schilt, who last year received the University’s Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Award, said teaching at the University of Chicago helps bring out not only the best educator but also the best scholar in her.
“What really stands out for me is how much the students want to be in the classroom … and learn beyond the classroom,” Schilt said. She taught a gender studies class last fall, she noted, after which some students contacted her wanting to do more. “So we read three more books, and they came over to my house and we discussed them. It’s rewarding. I find teaching to be something that allows me to be better at my research. Teaching makes me a better writer, a better scholar. We talk about ideas I am working on in the classroom.”
—Prof. Chuan He
