Described in online student reviews as “high energy,” “demanding but fair,” and “one of the best at Rutgers ... hands down,” Barry Qualls is the second Rutgers professor in three years to be named New Jersey Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE).
Qualls, a professor of English in New Brunswick and former chair of the English department, is now Rutgers’ vice president for undergraduate education after working as dean of humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for nine years. He taught the entire time he served as dean because of his love for teaching, particularly teaching his specialties – Victorian literature, Victorian women writers, and literature of the Bible.
President Richard L. McCormick named Qualls vice president for undergraduate education after Qualls chaired the task force that spurred the ongoing transformations in undergraduate education in New Brunswick, including the creation of the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. Although a collaborative effort, the task force’s findings were imbued with Qualls’ concerns about the engagement of college students.
Qualls was recognized not only for his teaching and his work on undergraduate education, but also for his prolific mentoring. Since he came to Rutgers in 1971, he has mentored and advised hundreds of students, helping them apply to graduate and professional schools and prodding them to explore intellectual activities outside the classroom.
“Dr. Qualls is the single best citizen of Rutgers University, and certainly a large part of that is his teaching,” McCormick said in a letter to the award committee. “Barry is known for his lively classroom style and his ability to engage students in Victorian novels and prose, works that students often initially resist because of a perception that they lack relevance to their own lives.”
Indeed, Qualls said that his teaching acumen comes not from prescribed teaching techniques, but from his own enthusiasm for the material – works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Jane Austen and others. “I happen to love these books. Even the trashy ones,” he said. “I also have a device to keep students reading: It’s called writing. I ask my students to write a lot because writing is a laboratory for thinking about these books.”
One of Qualls’s deepest concerns about college students is their level of engagement – with faculty, with their coursework, and with the world around them. “You don’t come to college to have your prejudices confirmed and your ignorances untouched,” he said. “You come to college to learn ideas different from the ones you’ve always grown up with, to meet people different from those you knew in high school. Some of the new ideas you will reject, some you won’t. But if you don’t take advantage of exposure to new ideas now, you will always be an insulated person, not ready, or willing, to participate in the civic life of any community.”
Rutgers, Qualls said, has produced a multitude of impressive, engaging students whom he has taught and from whom he continues to learn. It was a student 35 years ago, when Qualls was a brand-new assistant professor at Rutgers (the state university is the only place he has ever taught), who took the initiative to engage with Qualls. In 1971 Ernest Jacob, who would go on to become not a writer or a teacher but a Wall Street investment analyst, asked Qualls to discuss a recently published book, “The Performing Self,” by English faculty member Richard Poirier. From there, they began to discuss teaching; Jacob was taking Qualls’ class on Victorian poetry. Qualls credits Jacob with beginning his reeducation: learning the work of close reading as practiced by Poirier and other Rutgers faculty.
“As a young professor with anxieties about teaching, I was stunned by Ernie’s comments on different ways of reading poetry,” Qualls said. “So I began to study writing by my colleagues, especially Poirier and Bridget Lyons, whose large team-taught course on Shakespeare I frequently attended. I always credited Ernie Jacob as the person who got me started learning the Rutgers way of reading; who helped me to become a better teacher at the outset of my career.”
Since then, Qualls has placed a premium on offering students opportunities beyond the classroom. He teaches “19th-Century British Fiction” to about 100 students each year, and he organizes voluntary discussion sections to accompany the course. Each year, at least one section is led by an undergraduate who has taken and excelled in the class in previous years.
Christiane Gannon, a 2005 graduate of Douglass College who began her doctoral studies in English at Johns Hopkins University this year, taught these sessions, two years in a row. She looked to Qualls for direction, but he offered little in the way of “must do” directions – which was the best thing he could have done, according to Gannon.
“He is very interested in helping you develop your own style, both in teaching and writing,” Gannon said. “I am not interested in being the kind of teacher who tells students the exact interpretation of the book. I found a lot of guidance from Barry about how to give people the tools to open up new ways of thinking.”
Gannon developed weekly discussion guides for the sections, which Qualls said he and his teaching assistants still use to this day. “The discussion guides were an eye opener. I had never done that before, even though I’d been running discussion sessions for years. We do it every year now,” Qualls said. “There are days when I still give out some of her discussion guides because they are so well done. What she did seems obvious now, but it wasn’t to me then. She was a junior, and she taught me a lot.”
Gannon met Qualls while she was in high school, attending a brunch for students already accepted into the Douglass Scholars Program. Qualls is a long-time supporter of women’s education. He won the Douglass College Medal for service to Douglass College in 1996 and an award from the SAS Department of Women’s and Gender Studies in 2005 for his “dedication to the advancement of women and feminism.” He has also won the Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching and the FAS Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education.
Each year, the Carnegie Foundation and CASE name four U.S Professors of the Year and one Professor of the Year from each state. The program aims to increase awareness of the importance of undergraduate instruction. State winners receive a certificate and attend an awards ceremony in Washington, D.C. Rutgers mathematics professor Stephen Greenfield was named New Jersey Professor of the Year in 2004.
For more information, go to www.usprofessorsoftheyear.org.