Hegarty Award Citation for Associate Professor Bettina Scholz

The Louise F. Hegarty Award for Excellence in Teaching is given each year to a full-time faculty member whose teaching has had a marked influence on the lives of Stonehill students. The Committee on Excellence in Teaching, representing Students, Faculty, and the Alumni Council, selects the outstanding teacher from those nominated by students and faculty members. The award is named in honor of one of Stonehill’s most accomplished teachers and the recipient stands as a symbol of the entire faculty’s commitment to teaching and academic excellence. At this 2017 Academic Convocation, Stonehill College is proud to bestow the Louise F. Hegarty Award for Excellence in Teaching on Professor Bettina Scholz, Associate Professor of Political Science.

While many professors are nominated for this prestigious award, few receive nominations from the number and range of courses taught by Professor Scholz. Her commitment to teaching excellence and care-filled advising is abundantly clear in these words of students and faculty who nominated her.

• Professor Scholz has high expectations for her students, and she pushes you to attain a deeper level of learning with every class period and to challenge your reading and writing skills. But she manages to do something that I did not think possible: she makes political theory both relevant and fun. We spent a semester looking at modern issues like immigration reform and the Syrian refugee crisis and applied theory to these types of real-world situations. She has challenged me intellectually more than anyone else…on this campus.
• Professor Scholz has been one of the most incredible and influential professors I have had at Stonehill. Her classes are so thoroughly thought-out, and every reading that she assigns and discussion that we hold is tied back into one of the courses’ larger themes. No matter what your major is, everyone could gain something from taking one of Professor Scholz’s classes.
• Professor Scholz is a wonderful professor and person. She cares about her students and does everything possible to help students succeed in and outside the classroom. Professor Scholz’s dedication to the Stonehill community makes Stonehill College stronger. She embodies the mission of the institution. She challenges her students with unconventional questions that make students think and question what they know.
• Her classes make me think so incredibly deeply about politics, society, justice, morality, and simply the way the world works. I absolutely would not be on the path I am on without her classes, her teaching expertise, and her dedication to her students.

In the spring of 2013, Prof. Scholz’s letter from the Pre-Tenure Review Committee began with an extraordinary judgment about a faculty member still early in her career: “The Committee finds that Professor Scholz is a superb teacher.” What was already obvious to students became obvious to her colleagues. And so with deep pride we today recognize Professor Bettina Scholz for exemplifying Stonehill’s commitment to provide an education of the highest caliber that fosters critical thinking, free inquiry, and the interchange of ideas.

Given this thirtieth day of August,

Two thousand and seventeen