An endowed professorship honoring longtime professor Sol Gittleman will be one step closer to realization if its second phase of fundraising meets a Sept. 30 deadline.
When Gittleman stepped down in 2002 as university provost, the Board of Trustees and Vice President of University Advancement Brian Lee started the Gittleman Endowment for Excellence in Teaching, seeking to establish a unique professorship in line with Gittleman's passion for teaching.
The endowment's focus stresses that the recipient be a quality educator. For Gittleman and his former students, this means finding a balance that favors teaching and mentoring as well as research.
"It would be wonderful if this chair could reinforce the relationship between teaching and research," Gittleman told the Daily.
Steve Wermiel (A '72), Gittleman's former student, said the professorship recognizes a veteran teacher who has influenced students both in and out of the classroom.
"Sol is the best teacher I and thousands of other Tufts graduates have ever had in our lives," Wermiel said. "It would be worth honoring him if it were only for the sheer intellectual power, energy, excitement and perspective that he has brought to his classes for more than four decades."
Gittleman's history at Tufts spans over four decades and the terms of three university presidents. Starting in 1964 as an assistant professor of German, he served as chair of the Department of German, Russian and Asian Languages and Literature from 1966 to 1981, then was named provost and later senior vice president of the university.
He currently serves as the Alice and Nathan Gantcher University Professor
The Board of Trustees requires $2.25 million to fund an endowed professorship. Fundraising started in 2002 but got an extra push five years later when the New York-based Leon Lowenstein Foundation became involved. The foundation issued a challenge, creating four annual fundraising benchmarks. For each benchmark reached, the foundation promised to donate $50,000.
Tufts' Associate Director of Development Robert Ayles said that the foundation's challenge has encouraged others to donate. "They issued this gift to get others excited, get the advancement division focused on this and to encourage giving to get this fully funded," he said.
Fundraisers have currently amassed around $800,000 for the endowment, according to Ayles. The end of this month will mark the culmination of the second fundraising phase, which seeks to raise an additional $450,000.
The first phase of the Lowenstein Foundation-backed fundraising, beginning in late 2007 and ending in 2008, raised a total of $100,000. The third and fourth phases of fundraising are expected to raise $250,000 each.
Though additional funding beyond the four phases will be needed to reach the $2.25 million necessary to set the professorship in motion, Ayles was confident that the fund would reach its goal by 2011, in line with the end of Tufts' Beyond Boundaries capital campaign.
Ayles said the university sees the benchmarks as an effort to stimulate giving, but administrators within the development office are constantly working to get the professorship funded through their own devices.
In order to encourage widespread, small-scale contributions, the Lowenstein Foundation stipulated for the first phase only that the endowment not accept gifts of over $5,000, according to Ayles. Christine Sanni (LA '89), Tufts' director of Advancement Communications and Donor Relations, noted this method's sentimental significance. "It will be a great honor for Sol to see this professorship fulfilled by so many people who he's affected so greatly," she said.
Wermiel, who maintains close contact with Gittleman, hopes the fund will help another professor make the kind of connections Gittleman has formed at Tufts. "I would like to see the professorship encourage and reward good teaching," he said. "I hope it will be a recognition of the importance of a teacher's ability to stimulate critical thinking, to excite student minds with the power of ideas, to create a vibrant and dynamic classroom and to help students develop their potential by caring about them as people."
Although Gittleman has touched many Tufts students' lives, he expresses some discomfort with the amount of attention he has garnered and says that teaching remains a challenge.
"Teaching is not something I've ever felt easy with," Gittleman said. "To me teaching has always been a lot of work and a lot of fear, a lot of fear of failure. I think what keeps it interesting is the fear of failure."
Ayles said humility is one way that Gittleman represents the best qualities of the university. "Tufts has a culture, and Sol embodies it and lives it very clearly," he said. "That humility is something I find in alumni all over the country."
"Sol has energy, commitment, passion. He embodies the qualities we think of as embodying Tufts University," Ayles added.
