The University of Wisconsin System announced the winners of the 2005 Regents Teaching Excellence Awards Wednesday. The Board of Regents, which begins its October meeting in Van Hise Hall this morning, will ceremoniously recognize the recipients as part of its agenda Friday morning.
Receiving the prestigious awards this year are UW-La Crosse philosophy professor Kenneth Maly, UW-River Falls psychology professor Bradley Caskey and the UW-Oshkosh Department of Biology and Microbiology.
"Some of these folks get so excited they bring their family," UW System spokesperson Doug Bradley said. "It's one of the nicest things and most special moments we have at a regents' meeting."
Since the awards were first distributed in 1992, the regents have recognized only one UW-Madison program and one UW-Madison professor, the Bradley Learning Community in 1998 and English professor Cyrena Pondrom in 2001, respectively.
"Madison has [a] fairly robust and rigorous program of its own," Bradley said. "I think there is an eye to the fact that it's a big system [and that] there's excellence throughout."
Regent Charles Pruitt, a member of the Teaching Excellence Awards Committee, said the committee harbors no desire to diminish the accomplishments of faculty and programs affiliated with the system's flagship institution.
"This will be my third year and I don't think we've had in any of those three years for some reason a winner from Madison, but I don't think there's any desire to spread it around or not spread it around," Pruitt said, adding the committee attempts to evaluate individuals without any consideration of the particular UW institution from which they hail.
According to Bradley, the committee devotes a great deal of time and effort to determining the appropriate recipients every year and said the system is lucky to have so much talent.
"It's something that requires a lot of time and diligence and thought. It's a painstaking decision," he said. "The good news here is that we are blessed with fairly extraordinary people who do things that inspire our students to do great things, and we couldn't be happier about that."
UW-Oshkosh Provost and Vice Chancellor Lane Evans said the university takes great pride in the honor and added the co-chairs of the department will come to Madison tomorrow to receive their awards.
"It's the third time that we've won this award on our campus," Evans said. "I think it's reflective of the strides that we've made in recent years, and I'm very proud of them and I'm very proud of the students who they teach."
The regents will be in Madison today and tomorrow, and the presentation of the awards is just one issue to be discussed amid several more heated topics.
"There will be a [revised] sick-leave policy that will come out of this meeting, [and] there's going to be an update about the whole question of this audit function," Bradley said.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett will be in attendance today to express his concern over the proposed renaming of the UW Medical School to the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, which the regents will vote on.
In a Sept. 23 letter to Phillip Farrell, dean of the UW Medical School, Barrett questioned the decision to place the public-health school in Madison and not in Milwaukee.
"This Milwaukee thing has got some legs and some life," Bradley said. "There might be a little heat in the room for that."
