Bernice A. Pescosolido, Wilbert Hites mentoring award

Bernice A. Pescosolido Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology Co-director, Preparing Future Faculty Program Director, Indiana Consortium for Mental Health Services Research College of Arts and Sciences University Graduate School IU Bloomington

IU Bloomington Chancellor Sharon Brehm, Pescosolido and Interim President Gerald Bepko at the Founders Day ceremony

“There are no well-drawn lines between teaching, research and service,” Pescosolido said. “What we in higher education aim to do is encapsulated in the term stewardship, which includes generating new knowledge, conserving the important ideas that are a legacy of the past, explaining and connecting our fields of knowledge to others and understanding how disciplines fit into the larger intellectual and public landscape.”

Pescosolido is an unwavering advocate for her students, her colleagues and fellow scholars across the nation and throughout the world. She firmly believes that one is a mentor for life.

Pescosolido has worked hard to make mentoring a university-wide enterprise. She has held leadership roles in the university’s Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching program; helped to establish a program for graduate students to “shadow” professors at several liberal arts colleges and IU regional campuses; and located and offered resources, both financial and intellectual, to foster graduate students’ scholarship and participation in national conferences. She was a chief architect and is current co-director of the Preparing Future Faculty program. IU graduate students, under her mentorship, have published more in Teaching Sociology, a leading journal in the discipline, during the past few years than have students or faculty from any other university; and they have won more university teaching awards than any of their counterparts. They showed their gratitude by presenting her with the Graduate Student Association’s Outstanding Mentor Award in 2002.

Widely published in the literature of mentoring and teaching, Pescosolido is the co-author of what many consider to be the most comprehensive anthology on higher education today, The Social Worlds of Higher Education: Handbook of Teaching in a New Century. Distinguished as a scholar of national and international recognition, an award-winning teacher and virtually unmatched in the scope of her service activities, Pescosolido admirably lives up to her ideal of stewardship.

Professorial mentoring requires much more than a one-semester commitment and falls naturally under the term stewardship, believes Bernice Pescosolido, whose views on higher education are incorporated in what many consider to be the most comprehensive anthology on higher education today: ‘The Social Worlds of Higher Education: Handbook of Teaching in a New Century.’