Honorary Degrees of Retiring Faculty
Theodore W. Ross, Associate Professor of Geology, 1999
"Ted Ross, you have since 1966 served the students of Lawrence University in a variety of capacities that reflects the breadth of your talents and interests. Chiefly, of course, you have been a longstanding member, and sometime chair, of the Geology Department, teaching courses in many areas including crystallography and economic geology. Students have, over the years, praised your contagious enthusiasm for the field, your energy in the classroom, and your sincere attention to their needs. Your range as a teacher is indicated by your selection in 1969 as the outstanding teacher in Freshman Studies--surely no mean feat for a scientist.
Students and colleagues have also applauded your work in the field--and, during the years when you held a pilot's license, above the field--both in Wisconsin and on departmental trips to the West, and relish your self-appointed role as the quartermaster of these outings. When alumni call from Chicago to get the name of the place to get ribs in Colorado Springs, your influence on that front is affirmed. You are also widely recognized as the department's chief mechanic, and it is thanks to you that the R.V. Beverly is not only equipped but that it also floats.
You are as well the author of some of the more provocatively titled talks and papers to be produced by a Lawrence faculty member. I refer now not to 'A High-Sensitivity Spectrochemical Technique,' your article in Analytical Chemistry, but rather such talks as your fabled 'Oops, There Goes California,' and your Last Chance Lecture and upcoming presentation for the Alumni College entitled, 'Not in My Backyard!' --whose listeners, you note, 'may be offended by this lecture.'
Outside the classroom you have worked with students as a supervisor of ACM programs, as a faculty associate to the residence halls, and, most visibly and dramatically, as an assistant coach of the Vikings football team, whose offensive line you have, for sixteen years, advised and inspired. It is fair to say, I think, that you disabused many students of their stereotypical notions of both professors and coaches. In this sense you have embodied in your own career the combination of curricular and extra-curricular interests to which many of our students aspire, and which at a residential college we actively encourage. For this we honor and applaud you.
By the authority vested in me, I now confer upon you the degree of Master of Arts, ad eundem, and admit you to its rights, its privileges, and its obligations."