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 A
faint smile crosses Professor Suresht Renjen Bald’s face when
she is asked about her selection as Oregon’s 2003 Professor
of the Year. “Oh, that was a good thing,” she says,
not wishing to dwell on her accolade.
A mainstay of Willamette’s Department of Politics since
1982, Bald is one of 43 professors in the nation this year to receive
the prestigious teaching award from the Carnegie Foundation for
the Advancement of Teaching. Sharp-witted, quietly eloquent and
eternally poised, Bald credits colleagues and the University for
her success. She views the Carnegie award not as a career-defining
moment, but just another step along the unexpected pathway of her
life in education.
“I think one of the reasons that I became a teacher is that
I loved being a student,” she says, recalling a childhood
in which learning was valued and encouraged. “My mother always
urged us – my sisters and brothers – to get as much
education as we wanted. Perhaps she felt that way because,  as
a young woman in India, the elders in her community would not let
her sit for her final examination for a high school diploma. She
never forgot the disappointment.”
Bald has tried to instill in her students a curiosity for knowledge
and a passion for self-discovery. To her, academic success is measured
by personal growth as much as it is by scores or grades. “I
want them to reach their potential,” she says. “My expectation
is not that they are as good as the person sitting next to them,
but that they try to be as good as they can be.” As generations
of students can attest, one of Bald’s great strengths is her
ability to dissect the process of political decision-making in order
to delineate its human dimensions. “I try to emphasize that
all political decisions affect human beings. All decisions have
consequences, and we need to be aware of this necessary equation.
We can’t just look at a policy in the abstract because it
does – it will – materially impact someone, somewhere.”
Getting students to think and to act humanely remains at the core
of Bald’s teaching. Those abilities and virtues, she says,
form the essence of liberal arts education. “We are not only
training minds, we are also helping students realize that a diversity
of ideas and cultures is enriching rather than threatening. I’d
like to think that the classroom emphasis on treating each other
in a respectful and civilized way will continue into the future,
so that when they are challenged, our students will have a core
of decency that they can always bank on.”
Perhaps the greatest compliment to Bald as a teacher is how keenly
her loss will be felt by Willamette’s faculty and students
when she retires at the end of the semester. Pondering her final
months at Willamette, Bald finishes her thoughts the way any great
teacher would – by imparting a few final words of wisdom.
“A lot of Willamette graduates end up in positions of power.
I hope that when they make decisions, they will remember their liberal
arts education and remember, from that, what matters most is people.”
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