University Award for Excellence in Teaching
Mojmir Povolny, 1986
"You are a teacher to us all. In courses in international relations, you help your students to wrestle with the often conflicting demands of realpolitik, on the one hand, and our aspirations for peace and justice on the other. In courses on politics, you guide your students to an understanding of diverse political systems, even as you probe with them the tragic effects of political orders gone awry. You also, through your leadership of the Select Committee on Planning, led your colleagues to reflect in new ways about teaching itself. And, of course, you have been teacher to two deans, a task of formidable proportion and not always predictable consequence.
In all your teaching, you are sensitive to the interplay of individuals and institutions. But yours is not a mechanistic approach, for you keep always before your students the place of values in the conduct of human affairs. Your skilled guidance of the programs sponsored by the William Kellogg Harkins Fund enabled the community to engage responsibly the complex issues of nuclear weapons and disarmament and the problems of poverty amidst plenty. Your students, touched by your sense of compassion and respect for basic human rights and enlightened by your knowledge of political systems, depart Lawrence well equipped to meet the demands and obligations of principled citizenship. A teacher of government could ask no more. A liberal arts college could not be better served."