Hamilton College Women's Studies Professor Vivyan Adair has been named the 2004 New York State Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and The Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). She was selected from nearly 400 top professors in the United States.
Adair is the Elihu Root Peace Fund Associate Professor of Women's Studies and is founder and director of Hamilton's ACCESS Project, an educational, social service and career program that assists low-income parents in Central New York in obtaining a higher education. She joined the Hamilton faculty in 1998.
Hamilton College President Joan Hinde Stewart said, "Vivyan is an exemplary teacher and a role model, an accomplished scholar, and a warm and caring individual. She believes in the transformative nature of higher education because she has experienced it herself. As a result," said Stewart, "she takes nothing for granted and asks for a similar commitment from her students. She is truly an inspiring teacher."
Adair is the third Hamilton professor honored by the Carnegie Foundation and CASE in seven years. William R. Kenan Professor of Geology Barbara Tewksbury was the New York Professor of the Year in 1997 and Professor of Chinese Hong Gang Jin was the National Baccalaureate Professor of the Year in 1998.
The U.S. Professors of the Year program salutes the most outstanding undergraduate instructors in the country – those who excel as teachers and influence the lives and careers of their students. CASE established the Professors of the Year program in 1981 and the Carnegie Foundation became the co-sponsor a year later. This year there are winners in 47 states.
Adair came to Hamilton College in 1998, after earning a Ph.D. and master's from the University of Washington, Seattle. A child of poverty and single mother, she was able to attend college prior to the welfare reform enacted in 1996, legislation which she says had the effect of discouraging – and in many cases prohibiting – welfare recipients from entering into or completing educational programs, mandating instead that they engage in "work first." Since then Adair has become an advocate for enacting new legislation that will permit qualified low-income mothers to attend college.
Adair's own experiences led her to create the ACCESS Project at Hamilton College. The program, which began in 2001, enables low-income parents to take college courses at Hamilton, while providing social services such as childcare and transportation, as well as career advice and academic support. She has written and secured $2.85 million in state and private grants to support the project.
Adair is the author of From Good Ma to Welfare Queen, a Genealogy of the Poor Woman in American Literature, Photography and Culture (Garland Books), a study that explores literary, photographic and cultural representations of poor American women and offers a view of the interlocking systems of race, gender and class oppression (2000). She is also co-editor of Reclaiming Class: Women, Poverty and the Promise of Education in America, (Temple University Press, 2003), a book of essays written by women who, poor as children, changed their lives through the pathway of higher education.
She has written 18 book chapters and articles in refereed journals, including Harvard Educational Review, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Pedagogy, Public Voices, Feminist Studies and History of Labor studies.
In a letter nominating Adair for the CASE award, Hamilton College Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty David Paris wrote "Professor Adair is one of those exceptional teachers who has literally transformed her own life and the lives of others through her work... She is best known for her development of the ACCESS program. Having realized the significance of education in getting her out of poverty, she has created a program of education here at Hamilton, coupled with other kinds of support, which is an innovative and successful example of how welfare to work can succeed...It is important to note then the program does not stand apart from her teaching and scholarship but is part and parcel of it. It involves teaching of students of all backgrounds, is a scholarly project that raises important issues for public policy and it is certainly a service to communities locally and nationally. Her development of ACCESS is testimony to her willingness to teach and study and serve in the broadest sense."
A student who wrote in support of her nomination said "Professor Adair's distinction comes from her ability to combine personal experience and established ideology with a teaching style that invites students to challenge themselves, each other and their academic and social communities....She goes above and beyond classroom expectations by lending herself to campus and community activism around the very issues that challenge us in class."
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was founded in 1905 by Andrew Carnegie "to do all things necessary to encourage, uphold and dignify the profession of teaching. The Foundation is the only advanced study center for teachers in the world.
CASE is the largest international association of educational institutions with more than 3,200 colleges, universities and independent elementary and secondary schools in nearly 50 countries.
Professor Adair and her daughter, Heather, live in Clinton. She will be honored along with the national and other state Professor of the Year winners at a luncheon in Washington, D.C., on November 18.
