Yale College Teaching and Learning Committee

Prizes for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching

History of the Prizes

In 1980, the Yale College Faculty approved the following proposal for the creation and award of Yale College Prizes for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching:

The University can help to sensitize the Yale community to the importance it attaches to good teaching by regularly honoring those who have demonstrated excellence in this area. The Committee on Teaching and Learning recommends a four-year experiment in which up to three prizes ... [will] be awarded to outstanding teachers at each Class Day or Commencement Exercise. The Committee on Teaching and Learning will solicit nominations from the faculty and student body at large, seek such other information on the quality of teaching as it saw fit, and make the final selections. All Yale college faculty members, other than members of the Teaching and Learning Committee, would be eligible after having taught at Yale for three years. The Committee's charge would be to honor faculty demonstrating unique excellence in undergraduate teaching (be it laboratory, seminar, or lecture course) rather than to determine which instructors were most popular.

These Yale College Teaching Prizes were first awarded in 1981, and the "experiment," considered a success, has continued to the present day. Later two additional prizes were established. During the academic year 1989-1990, the Yale College faculty set up a fourth prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching, to be awarded on an annual basis to an individual who has held the title of Lecturer, Lector, Senior Lecturer, Senior Lector, or Adjunct Professor for at least three years. And in the spring of 1993, a fifth prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching was established by an anonymous alumnus in the Class of 1942 as The Harwood F. Byrnes / Richard B. Sewall Teaching Prize, to be awarded to "a teacher in Yale College who has given the most time, energy, and effective effort to helping undergraduates learn."