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Date: February 20, 1997
Princeton Names First Visiting Professors for Distinguished Teaching
PRINCETON, N.J. -- A professor of mathematics from Williams College and a professor of history from Brooklyn College and the City University of New York's Graduate Center will be the first two incumbents of new visiting professorships for distinguished teaching at Princeton.
Frank Morgan, a professor of mathematics at Williams, and Teofilo Ruiz, a professor of history at Brooklyn College and at CUNY's Graduate Center will be in residence at Princeton during the 1997-98 academic year.
The visiting professorships were established by Princeton President Harold T. Shapiro as part of a set of teaching initiatives announced at the beginning of the University's 250th anniversary celebration last year. The program, known as the 250th Anniversary Visiting Professorships for Distinguished Teaching, aims eventually to support as many as five visiting faculty members each year, spread across all divisions of the University.
Visitors are selected for their demonstrated excellence in teaching and their capacity to bring new ideas in undergraduate teaching to the campus. Each will teach an undergraduate course, possibly in collaboration with a regular faculty member. The visitors will also engage in other activities aimed at improving teaching at Princeton, such as workshops for faculty and graduate students, demonstration lectures, and classroom visits.
While universities often invite distinguished scholars to serve as visiting professors, "we know of no other university that has this kind of program to bring distinguished teachers to its campus as visitors," said Dean of the Faculty Amy Gutmann. "We believe it will add to Princeton's already excellent teaching program and reinforce our reputation as a major research university that is dedicated to excellence in undergraduate education."
Professor Morgan works in minimal surfaces and studies the behavior and structure of minimizers in various dimensions and settings. In 1995, he published a new edition of his text on Geometric Measure Theory: A Beginner's Guide and a new book, Calculus Lite , which is prescribed for use in Princeton's introductory courses, MAT 101 and 102. He has also published a text on Riemannian Geometry: A Beginner's Guide (1993).
A 1974 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Morgan earned his doctorate in mathematics at Princeton in 1977. He then spent 10 years at MIT, where he received the Everett Moore Baker Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. In 1993 at Williams, he earned one of the first national awards for distinguished teaching from the American Mathematical Society. He works with undergraduates to produce a weekly live call-in program called Math Chat on local cable television, and he writes a biweekly Math Chat column for The Christian Science Monitor .
"Frank Morgan is a well-known research mathematician, who has been widely recognized for his undergraduate teaching efforts," said Peter Sarnak, chair of Princeton's Mathematics Department, who nominated Morgan for the visiting professorship. "I believe he will give something very special and attractive to the beginning calculus student, as well as to our graduate students and faculty."
Morgan describes his teaching approach as using the simplest examples to expose the principles involved in understanding complex phenomena. His Calculus Lite departs radically from traditional textbooks in that it is a fraction of the length; "it gets right to the point, and stops there," he said, "rather than describing every possible strategy to derive a proof -- a tendency that can be distracting, and sometimes overwhelming, to students."
Professor Ruiz is a historian of medieval Castile and 16th century Spain. His most recent book, Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile (1994), a social and economic history, won the American Historical Association's Premio del Rey for the best book on Spanish history in 1995. He has also studied the history of popular culture and is currently at work on a new book, "A Social History of Spain, 1400 1600."
A 1969 graduate of the City College of the City University of New York, he obtained a master's degree from New York University before coming to Princeton for his doctorate, which he received in 1974. He joined the faculty at Brooklyn College in 1973, earning tenure in 1981 and becoming a full professor in 1985. He joined the faculty of CUNY's Graduate Center in 1988. His teaching earned him the Professor of the Year award for master's level colleges and universities from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1995.
"Professor Ruiz is a charismatic, enthusiastic and learned lecturer, who will fire up student interest in early modern Europe," said Philip Nord, chair of Princeton's Department of History, who nominated Ruiz for the visiting professorship. "He has a Princeton PhD, and he has taught for us before, so he knows how undergraduate teaching works here. He's a perfect fit. He will use his talents to immediate advantage."
"The most important thing in teaching is to show students that you care for them," said Ruiz. "That means we must challenge them, even subvert them. They must learn to question the material, as well as their own convictions, and they can only do so in a nurturing atmosphere."
He added: "I remain committed to public education and to the kind of teaching I have done at Brooklyn College for the past 23 years; at the same time, I am delighted for the opportunity to learn from and contribute to my alma mater and to Princeton students and to the community."
Both visitors know Princeton's faculty well. Both cite mentors who helped them learn how to teach as graduate students. Morgan visited at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1990-91, and he assisted with a Princeton graduate course while he prepared his textbook on Riemannian geometry. Ruiz has lived in Princeton Township for 25 years; he was a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1983-84 and in the Princeton University History Department in spring 1995.
"I am pleased and gratified to see this program so well begun," said Shapiro. "These visiting professorships provide an exciting new way to bring distinguished teachers to Princeton to participate in our continuing efforts to revitalize undergraduate education. As first-rate scholars and teachers, Professor Morgan and Professor Ruiz are excellent examples of the caliber of visitors we are seeking for this program."
In addition to the new visiting professorships, President Shapiro has established a special fund for innovations in teaching, which provides grants to Princeton faculty for curriculum development work. Through the University's 250th Anniversary Campaign, he is also seeking funds to support a new Center for Teaching and Learning, a facility to be associated with the new campus center. According to Dean of the College Nancy Weiss Malkiel, the center will be a place "where faculty come together to talk about, devise and test teaching innovations; where graduate students develop their teaching skills; and where undergraduates hone their skills and draw on new technologies and new strategies for effective learning to supplement the work they do in their classes."