Sunday’s Washington Post had a nice writeup of the late Georgetown Professor Walter Giles (SFS ‘43, GRD ‘45) in which Bill Clinton (SFS ‘68) and some of his classmates reminisce about his stringent classroom practices by T. Rees Shapiro. Giles, a constitutional law and American government professor, used to lock the door of his lecture hall five minutes into class against tardy students.

“If students were not prepared and wanted to avoid the humiliation of being called upon without an answer, they had to approach the professor before class began and plead ‘nolo contendere,’ or no contest,” Shapiro writes.

For his part, Clinton remembers falling asleep in Dr. Giles’s class during a lecture on a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Dr. Giles said the ruling was easy to understand, “unless, of course, you’re from some hick town in Arkansas,” which sent the class into stitches and startled Clinton awake. Clinton recalls never falling asleep in the class again.

According to his Washington Post obituary Giles graduated from the School of Foreign Service in 1943. He returned to Georgetown after serving in the Army Air Forces in World War II and earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in government in 1945 and 1956. He taught government for 43 years until he retired in 1990. He passed away as a result of congestive heart failure at 89 on October 9.

Photo from the The Washington Post

Joan Riley (right) with two NHS professors at NHS Graduation

On Thursday, Georgetown Professor Joan Burggraf Riley (NHS’76, G’97) was named the District of Columbia Teacher of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

Riley, an assistant professor at Georgetown’s School of Nursing and Health Studies, has attended and taught at Georgetown for more than 30 years. She has worked with other faculty to integrate mental health and wellness topics into other academic departments through the Bringing Theory to Practice project.

She also serves as the faculty advisor for Georgetown’s chapter of Best Buddies International, which pairs student volunteers with individuals who have intellectual and developmental disabilities, and works in the Student Health Center as a family health practitioner.

“I have known Joan for many years, and her commitment to the development and well-being of our undergraduates is a model for all of us in the academy,” President John DeGioia said on Thursday at a reception held in the District for Riley, four national winners of the award, and other winners from 38 states and territories.

Riley’s award marks the second year in a row that a Georgetown professor was selected for the award. Math Department Chair James Sandefur won in 2008.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington provoked quite a stir this week when it announced that it would abandon its contracts with the city unless the D.C. Council changed its proposed same-sex marriage bill.  The church says that the bill could force it to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, so they would no longer be able to provide the charitable services they currently offer.

Patrick Deneen (left), an associate professor of Government at Georgetown and director of the Tocqueville Forum, hosted a chat on the Washington Post’s website yesterday to explain and defend the Archdiocese’s decision.

Deneen spent a large part of the chat trying to re-frame the issue as the church being forced into giving up business relations with the city:

I think the basic premise of the Post’s story requires clarification. The premise of today’s story was that the Catholic Church was threatening to cease to provide charitable services if the law legalizing gay marriage is passed. In point of fact, it is the DC government that would cease to license or contract with the Church unless the Church conformed to a definition of marriage that violates its faith tradition.

Without a set of broader legal exemptions allowing for the Church to remain faithful to its definition of marriage, it will cease to be permitted by the City to provide the contracted and licensed services that it has for well over a century. The Church’s fundamental desire in this controversy is to continue its desire and freedom to serve.

Read the rest of this entry »

You learn a fair amount about Christopher Columbus and how he sailed the ocean blue in 1492 in elementary school, but now one Georgetown professor has a new theory about everyone’s favorite destroyer of indigenous populations: he was a Catalan-speaking Jew!

Estelle Irizarry, a professor emeritus in the department of Spanish and Portuguese, studied the language and syntax Columbus used in his letters and noticed a strange punctuation pattern.  He frequently used a slash symbol to indicate pauses in sentences, a style found only in texts from Catalan-speaking areas of the Iberian peninsula.

Furthermore, Irizarry found that much of Columbus’s linguistic habits are associated with Ladino, a dialect spoken by Spanish Jews in late medieval Spain.  This finding led Irizarry to conclude that Columbus must have been a convert to Christianity who hid his Jewish roots.

A common gripe around pre-registration time and add/drop period is the scarcity of syllabi for Georgetown classes. Anecdotally, we all know the syllabus situation is pretty dire, but just how bad is it?

Well, Vox took a look at the Fall 2009 class schedule to see how the numbers break down, and it’s not good. Granted, classes don’t start for a few months, and the number of syllabi posted will probably (hopefully) increase a bit over the summer. But with pre-registration come and gone, it’s fair to say that this is (more or less) the level information students were presented with when we had to formulate our academic plans for the upcoming semester.

Here’s what we found:

• The vast majority of classes—917 of 1508 courses, or 60.8 percent—do not have any syllabus whatsoever. For 150 classes (9.9 percent of the classes offered for Fall 2009), the reason that there is no syllabus is that there is no professor assigned to the class yet.
• 433 classes (28.7 percent) have syllabi for past versions of the course online. While these old syllabi aren’t perfect since it’s hard to know how much the professor plans on updating the course, they at least give students some sense of what to expect from the class.
• For a 158 classes (10.5 percent), the professors have posted syllabi for Fall 2009.

The 2006-07 Intellectual Life Report noted that many students were dissatisfied with the availability and usefulness of syllabi, and called for “the dissemination of information about effective syllabus design and and assessment.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like there’s been much progress in terms of giving students adequate information to make informed decisions about their academic futures.

A few notes about the numbers: I compiled the data by looking at all the undergraduate classes (anything with a course number under 500) that MyAccess shows for Fall 2009 except Senior Thesis seminars, labs, athletics classes and anything offered abroad (like at SFS-Q or the Villa). The numbers were found by going to the professor of each class’s faculty profile and seeing whether or not they had a syllabus for the course posted. The data was collected over the past three weeks or so.

A few days ago we discovered that Jack DeGioia’s resorted to using Craigslist to search for a suitable assistant. Now it looks like one of his colleagues is also using the site, albeit for less wholesome (but much more hilarious) purposes:

Professor fantasy? – m4w – 35 (Georgetown)

Ever find yourself attracted to your professor and secretly fantasizing that at some point you’ll be alone with him talking, laughing, subtly flirting, playing coy but giving all the signs of romantic interest — then he moves close, touches your arm, pulls your body into his, and kisses you with the ardor of a libidinous teenager and the skill of an experienced lover?

Ever find yourself daydreaming about being in his class, about his nicely sculpted physique, about his attentive and sincere manner of addressing students’ questions, about his passionate interest in the subject matter, about his confidence, his flair with words, his humility about his intellectual boundaries, his warmth and charm?

If this is you, maybe you’d like to turn your fantasy into reality? Maybe a private tutorial with an handsome professor is in order? If you’re very cute and interested in a discreet relationship, I’d love to hear from you.

Georgetown’s G. Donald Murphy, SJ, says he’s found the Holy Grail in the German city of Bamberg. Indiana Jones would have you believe the grail’s a cup, but Murphy says it’s actually an altar stone.

No Hottest Professor list would be complete without Ivo Jansen’s name right at the top. The Dutchman came to the U.S. for his MBA and, lucky for us, decided to stay.

He is tall, slim, and blonde with an angular jaw and bright blue eyes. But his hottest feature is his sense of humor. He always starts out class by asking students, by name, their best story from the past weekend. He laces his lectures with jokes and when he sees students’ eyes begin to glaze over, he immediately changes the subject away from accounting to drag the class back in before he continues with the lesson.

Proof of his excellent teaching ability? Most students raise their grade a full step from Financial Accounting, the class that Jansen teaches, to Managerial Accounting, taken the following semester. I, on the other hand, dropped from an A- to a C+ when I no longer had Ivo’s lovely smile to engage me in the world of debits and credits. Oh well, it wasn’t meant to be; I am now an English major but still look back oh so fondly on afternoons in Accounting.

Posted by Kathryn Brand, Contributing Editor

The Voice is pleased to announce an open call for nominations from its readers for the hottest professors you’ve spent hours batting your eyes at in countless dreary seminar rooms and lecture halls. They might be an Eros of economics like Sanjay Chugh, a foxy Portuguese prof like Valeria Buffo or some as-yet-undiscovered starlet out of a more remote department like Cell Biology or Polish. The discipline doesn’t matter, as long as your heart’s set a-flutter at every irregular conjugation, supply graph and textual analysis that floats like a gentle breeze through your lovelorn ears.

Email your favorites to thevoice@georgetown.edu, or just leave a comment right here. We’ll start posting the results by next week, with accompanying interviews, bios and high-resolution photos of the cooperative winners.

Posted by Chris Norton, Editor in Chief