Teaching careers gain faculty emeritus status

BOWLING GREEN, O.—The Bowling Green State University Board of Trustees granted professor emeritus status to seven retired or retiring faculty members and associate emeritus status to six others during the May 6 meeting.

Emeritus status is conferred in recognition of distinguished service to the University. To be designated as emeritus, individuals must have been at the University for at least 10 years and been recommended by their department for the designation.

Following are those named professor emeritus:

Dr. D.S. Chauhan retired from the political science department in June 2010 after 30 years of service to BGSU. His research in the areas of public policy analysis, labor relations and public health resulted in numerous publications, including a co-authored and two sole-authored books. He was the founding director of the master’s program in public administration and founding executive director of the Ohio Rural Universities Program. In 1987 he was a Fulbright fellow in Sri Lanka.

Dr. Eugene Dybdahl retired from teaching music performance studies several years ago, after joining the University in 1989. A professor of voice and director of opera, his legacy in the College of Musical Arts is most closely tied to the Bowling Green Opera Theater. Dybdahl began a series of collaborations between the music college and the theatre and film department that have turned out to be significant for the University.

Dr. R.G. Frey retired from the philosophy department in August 2010. In his 24 years at BGSU, he conducted research in moral, legal and political philosophy, editing or writing 11 books. His appointment in 1986 coincided with the launch of the department’s innovative and highly successful Ph.D. in applied philosophy, and his presence was a significant factor in the department’s being able to recruit many outstanding faculty.   

Dr. Richard Gebhart will retire in June from the English department, where he had served as chair for eight years. An internationally recognized scholar in the area of composition studies, he was editor of the flagship journal College Composition and Communication for six years. He won the John Gerber 20th Century Leadership Award in 2000 from the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Through his own research and writing and the great care he provided students during the recruitment process, he elevated BGSU’s doctoral program in rhetoric and writing to national status.

Dr. Richard Kennell retired this month as dean of the College of Musical Arts after 31 years at BGSU. Under his direction, the college garnered millions of dollars in gifts, initiated a new doctoral program in contemporary music, held over 500 public events a year and achieved record student enrollments at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Kennell became an expert in innovative recruitment and enrollment management techniques, frequently presenting on the subject. His legacy of collaboration among the arts lives in the Arts Roundtable, the Center of Excellence in the Arts and the building of the Wolfe Center for the Arts.

Dr. Thomas Kinstle, Distinguished Teaching Professor of chemistry, has been a productive and valued member of his department for 40 years. He will retire in June, leaving a legion of alumni he trained in organic chemistry, many of whom attended a special symposium they organized in honor of his 70th birthday. He has served as graduate coordinator of the department for more than 20 years. With more than a million dollars in external funding for his research, he has published an organic chemistry textbook and numerous articles on organic mass spectrometry and other topics.

Dr. Laura Leventhal will retire from the computer science department in June. She joined the faculty in 1986, serving as acting chair in 2008. Her research agenda, for which she received major National Science Foundation funding, has joined computer science to cognate disciplines, and she has published widely on human-computer interaction, visual cognition and spatial-working memory, in addition to ground-breaking work on the mental transformation of virtual reality. She is one of two faculty who coordinate the Cognitive and Computing Sciences Dual Degree Option, and this spring received the Faculty Mentor Recognition Award.

Dr. Barbara Moses will retire in June from the mathematics and statistics department after 33 years as a leader in the promotion of math education. In the past decade she has received over $6 million in external grants for projects aimed at both pre-service and in-service math teachers, from kindergarten through college. She has developed the department’s Master of Arts in Teaching program and was the first director of COSMOS (Center of Excellence in Science and Mathematics Education: Opportunities for Success), and the first director of the state Science and Mathematics Education in Action teacher-preparation program. In 2009, she received the Kenneth Cummins Award for Exemplary Teaching of Mathematics at the University Level from the Ohio Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Dr. Vivian (Vicki) Patraka has had a varied, 30-year career at BGSU, with appointments in English and American culture studies. A main achievement has been establishing and sustaining an intellectual community of teacher-scholars on campus. Since 1996, she has been director of the interdisciplinary Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, where she mentored faculty from across the University and fostered humanities research. Her specialization is in contemporary theatre and drama, performance studies and feminist theory. She has published and presented widely and provided service to her profession in multiple ways, earning the 2010 Faculty Distinguished Service Award.

The faculty members named associate professor emeritus include:

Dr. Jeffrey Wagner, astronomy and geology, who will retire at the end of the academic year. Wagner’s career at BGSU Firelands began in 1981. He served as chair of the Department of Natural and Social Sciences for nine years, helping to grow and advance that department. In 2007, his work in the classroom was recognized with the Distinguished Teaching Award.

Dr. William Lake, music theory, will retire this summer. Lake has been at BGSU since 1988 and has held a number of administrative positions including coordinator of aural skills, coordinator of music theory and supervisor of the music computer-assisted-instruction lab. Lake also wrote book chapters on technology for teaching and George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children.

Dr. Frank Glann, theatre/humanities, will retire at the end of the academic year. Glann’s career at BGSU Firelands spans four decades in the classroom, theatre and surrounding community. He was instrumental in building and guiding the Firelands Theater and was also deeply involved in the Huron Playhouse.

Dr. Danny Myers, applied statistics and operations research, will retire at the end of the academic year. Myers’ career spans 25 years at BGSU as a professor, the acting chair of the Department of Applied Statistics and Operations Research for two separate years, and the director of the Master of Science in Computer Science with a concentration in Operations Research Program.

Dr. Robert DeBard, higher education and college student personnel programs, will retire at the end of the summer. DeBard served as the dean of BGSU Firelands from 1988-93 before coming to the Bowling Green campus and the Department of Higher Education and Student Affairs. He authored a textbook considered a “must read” for students interested in managing student affairs resources and was named the 2011 Master Teacher.

Dr. Carolyn Palmer, college student personnel (CSP), will retire June 1. Palmer has taught in the master’s degree program for over two decades and helped start the Ph.D. program in higher education administration. She has taught nearly every course in the CSP curriculum, and 10 years ago became the coordinator of the adult learner focus, helping recruit many nontraditional students to BGSU. Palmer established the Diversity Enhancement Fund that provides financial support to students, faculty and staff for professional development and helped launch study abroad tours that continue today.

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(Posted May 09, 2011 )