Faculty Garner National Recognition with Awards, Fellowships, Service and Publications

The superlative contributions of Jepson faculty members in the realms of teaching and scholarship continue to shape and refine the emerging discipline of leadership studies and increasingly garner national recognition for the School. In the last six months alone, faculty members have received several prestigious awards and fellowships.  

Douglas A. Hicks, associate professor of religion and leadership studies and director of the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement, shared the Templeton Foundation’s first In Character Prize and the accompanying $10,000 award check with Jonathan B. Wight, associate professor of economics and international studies at the Robins School of Business, for their article “Disaster Relief: What Would Adam Smith Do?” originally published in the Jan. 18, 2005, Christian Science Monitor. Related article. 

In their op-ed piece, Hicks and Wight argued in support of developing people’s “moral imagination” to the extent that they can empathize with and take action to help human suffering around the world. The inspiration for this article grew out of Hicks and Wight’s collaboration on “Ethics and Economics,” a course made possible through the Keck Initiative supporting the integration of leadership studies across the liberal arts curriculum.  

This fall the University recognized Hicks’ accomplishments in the classroom by naming him one of six recipients of the 2005-06 Distinguished Educator Award. In addition, the Spanish government awarded Hicks a fellowship at the University of Granada to research the connection between political leadership and religious diversity in Spain. 

“Spain has done a better job with proactive efforts to avoid bias and inter-religious tensions in civic life than some other European nations like France,” Hicks said, pointing to Spain’s rich and complicated history of Jewish, Christian and Muslim interaction. Hicks, on sabbatical this academic year, planned to spend three months—February through April—conducting his research in Granada. 

Like Hicks, Gary L. McDowell, Tyler Haynes Interdisciplinary Professor of Leadership Studies, Political Science and Law, will soon have the chance to explore one of his primary research interests: the use of original intention as a method for interpreting the U.S. Constitution. McDowell received a highly coveted $40,000 full fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund his research. 

“This project is an attempt to recover the intellectual or philosophic foundations of original intention as the most sound approach to judicial interpretation and thereby to recover the original Constitution as it was understood by those who framed and ratified it,” McDowell said. Related article.

In January Jepson’s newest faculty member, assistant professor Karen Zivi, learned that the Foundations of Political Theory division of the American Political Science Association (APSA) had selected her “Rights and Politics of Performativity” as its nominee for best paper presented at the APSA annual meeting held in September 2006, putting Zivi in contention for the Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award.  

“Drawing on the well-known feminist theorist Judith Butler,” Zivi said, “I argued that [human] rights remain an important part of progressive democratic politics.” Although APSA won’t announce the winner of the award until late summer, Zivi felt honored to be in the running.  

The National Association of Counties (NACo) nominated the Next Generation Leadership Academy, a program of the University’s Center for Leadership in Education which offers leadership training to aspiring school principals, for its annual Achievement Award. According to Thomas Shields, Jepson faculty member and director of the Center for Leadership in Education, NACo will announce the award winner in July. 

In September, Style Weekly, a popular metro Richmond newsweekly, named Shields to its annual "Top Forty Under 40" list for his contributions to leadership education and his efforts to involve young people in service. Related article. 

Finally, in March the American Society for Public Administration awarded adjunct faculty member and editor of Governing magazine Alan Ehrenhalt the Donald Stone Award for “significant continuous contributions to the field of intergovernmental management over a substantial period of time.”  

In addition to the fellowships and awards they have garnered recently, faculty members continue to make substantive contributions through their service and publications. For example, incoming dean Sandra J. Peart is president-elect of the History of Economics Society and John Donelson Ross Forsyth, the Colonel Leo K. and Gaylee Thorsness Chair in Ethical Leadership, is president-elect of the Group Psychology and Group Psychotherapy Division of the American Psychological Association.  

A number of years ago, James MacGregor Burns, a Pulitzer Prize-winning political scientist and author of the classic Leadership (1978), convened a group of leadership studies scholars to research and develop a theory of leadership. The upshot of this effort—The Quest for a General Theory of Leadership, co-edited by George R. Goethals, E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Chair, and Georgia L. J. Sorenson of the University of Maryland—was released by Edward Elgar Publishing in December 2006.  

Current and former Jepson faculty members authored most of the essays in the book. According to the book’s dust jacket, contributors “tackle topics such as: the many faces of power woven into the leadership fabric; crucial elements of group dynamics and the leader-follower relationship; ethical issues lying at the heart of leadership; constructivist perspectives on leadership, causality, and social change; and the historical and cultural contexts that influence and are influenced by leadership.”  

In other news, Choice, the primary review publication for academic librarians, recently named The “Vanity of the Philosopher”: From Equality to Hierarchy in Post-Classical Economics, co-authored by incoming dean Sandra J. Peart and David M. Levy and published in 2005, an Outstanding Academic Title. Economics scholar Stanley Engerman had this to say about the book: “In their customary idiosyncratic manner, Sandra Peart and David Levy reexamine the way in which the views of classical economists on equality and hierarchy were shifted by contact with scholars in other disciplines, and the impact this had on attitudes towards race, immigration, and eugenics.”