2005 Lynton Recipients

Ernest A. Lynton Faculty Award
for the Scholarship of Engagement

2005 Award Recipient and Honorable Mentions

Ernest A. Lynton raised the profile and status of faculty professional service both nationally and internationally. He championed a vision of service that embraced collective responsibility, a vision of colleges and universities as catalysts not only in the discovery of new knowledge but also in its application throughout society. In the past eight years, over 500 faculty members have been nominated for this prestigious award, from every institutional type and location and from a broad range of departments and disciplines.

This year's recipient and honorable mentions are noteworthy in the diversity and scope of activities with which they are involved. Our panel of peer reviewers was impressed with the nominees' credentials and the impact of their service. This year we received nominations of faculty members who represented every type of academic institution, and multiple disciplines.

The service of these faculty members not only benefits the community outside academe, but also has a real and lasting impact on their institutions through the development of courses and curricula, and collaborative research ventures with colleagues. Perhaps most impressive is the clear connection between the outreach activities of these faculty and the involvement of their students. Each of the faculty members enhances and deepens their understanding of their fields and therefore their teaching. The award recipient and honorable mentions exemplify this connection between extending their own knowledge to enhance the lives of others in our society and to motivate their students to follow their lead.

Award Recipient

Marybeth Lima, Ph.D., an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering at Louisiana State University, became an engineer because she wanted to make the world a better place. She found as a student and professional that engineering often boasts of serving society, but in reality it serves entities such as private commercial interests that often overlook societal concerns. Since coming to LSU, Dr. Lima has employed service-learning in her classes, a pedagogy through which she cultivates in engineering students an understanding of the social and historical aspects of people, culture, and society that are central to the design process and vital to success.Dr. Lima’s goal is to guarantee that every child in public elementary schools, beginning locally in Baton Rouge and aiming nationwide, has access to a playground. Just as she conceptualizes her teaching with an eye toward fostering democratic sensibilities, she frames her professional service in engineering problem solving from multiple perspectives with an emphasis on equality, dignity, and respect for all partners involved in the design process and works in close collaboration with undergraduate students, teachers, and community partners in all aspects of the process including design, fundraising, and implementation. As LSU’s first Service-Learning Faculty Fellow, Dr. Lima is endeavoring to establish an infrastructure and policies to support service-learning campus-wide with particular attention to promotion and tenure issues. Through work that seamlessly combines the scholarship of teaching, research, and professional service, Dr. Lima truly embodies the notion of the engaged scholar.

Honorable Mentions

Phil Brown is Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at Brown University, who has championed the causes of numerous community groups that have struggled against toxic waste contamination and breast cancer. Through his academic work and direct activism, he has advocated for, participated in, and worked to create opportunities for community-based participatory research, merging his commitment to sociology with engaged research that seeks to catalyze social and environmental justice. Dr. Brown organized the NSF-funded Contested Illness Research Project at Brown, a multidisciplinary, inter-institutional team that includes faculty, graduate and undergraduate students from several Brown departments as well as faculty from other institutions. The team has produced a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals, many of which were co-authored by undergraduate and graduate students.

Greg Lindsey is Associate Dean of the School of Public and Environmental Affairs and the Duey-Murphy Professor of Rural Land Policy at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). He is an environmental planner who explores ways for the university to harness its assets to assist local, regional, and state leaders in solving problems and improving the life of Indiana residents. He works with agencies at the state and local levels to increase their understanding of complex problems and to create new state legislation and policy. Dr. Lindsey’s approach to service-learning provides students with opportunities to learn through practice and to enter into the world of professional service by working on problems ranging from financing municipal stormwater programs to abatement of lead poisoning in inner city youth to establishing an immigrant welcome center for new migrants to Indianapolis. He has also co-authored publications, many of them accepted in peer-reviewed journals, with students. Dr. Lindsey was the inaugural recipient of the Chancellor’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Civic Engagement at IUPUI.

Clement Alexander Price is the Board of Governors’ Distinguished Service Professor of History, Director and Founder of the Rutgers Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University, Newark Campus. Dr. Price’s career is marked by a blend of traditional and public intellectual work that brings scholarship and scholars to a cross section of citizens and communities in Greater Newark. He is among the first scholars in Newark to dramatize the role of the public intellectual in ameliorating racial discord, shedding light on historical memory, dignifying the bittersweet narratives of African Americans in modern history, and leading public and private institutions toward a higher standard of public service. The work of the Rutgers Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and Modern Experience Rutgers-Newark brings faculty together with teachers in the K-12 system in the Teachers as Scholars initiative, brings community leaders into campus as part of the Newark Reads DuBois project, and provides cultural awareness training for Newark State Police.

Past Lynton Award Recipients