May 7, 2002

Contact: Amy Beecher Mirecki, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, (785) 864-3516.

Carothers, Rowland, Schowen win KU outstanding academic advisor award

LAWRENCE -- Three College of Liberal Arts and Science faculty members at the University of Kansas have been named winners of the J. Michael Young Academic Advisor Award.

The winners are James Carothers, professor of English; Robert Rowland, professor of communications studies; and Barbara Schowen, professor of chemistry and director of the University Honors Program. Each will receive a $500 award and will be honored at a public reception at 5 p.m. Wednesday, May 15, in the Malott Room of the Kansas Union.

Established in 1991, the award honors the late J. Michael Young, who was a KU professor of philosophy and director of the University Honors Program. The award has been presented annually to college faculty who excel in student advising. In 2000, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Alumni Club Advisory Board, which selects the winners from the pool of nominees, began presenting an award to a faculty member in each of the College's three divisions -- humanities, natural sciences and social sciences.

Undergraduates in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences make J. Michael Young Award nominations, which are limited to teaching faculty. The criteria for the award include: having a caring attitude toward students; assisting students with their career options/decisions; making an effort to be available to students for help and advising; and giving time and creative efforts to the art and science of guiding students through the process of setting both long-term and short-term educational and career goals.

James Carothers came to KU in 1970 after earning his doctorate in English at the University of Virginia. He has been a professor of English since 1985 and an honors faculty fellow since 1997. His research and teaching interests center on the works of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, American humor and the literature of baseball. Author of "William Faulkner's Short Stories" and founding co-editor of The Faulkner Journal, Carothers has lectured and presented papers nationally at institutions ranging from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to the University of California at Berkeley, and he has made international presentations in Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and China. He served 11 years as associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and two terms as chair of the University Senate Executive Committee and faculty senate president. This year he is serving as associate provost for academic services. At the beginning of this semester he received a William T. Kemper/KU Endowment fellowship for teaching excellence. MORE

Robert C. "Robin" Rowland is a 1977 KU graduate with a degree in communication studies. As a KU debater, he and his debate colleague, Frank Cross, won the 1976 National Debate Championship. After completing a master's degree at Northwestern University and a doctorate at KU, Rowland taught at Baylor University for five years, where he also served as the debate coach. Since returning to KU in the fall of 1987, Rowland has taught classes in argumentation, leadership and rhetorical analysis at KU. He has served as the chair of the Department of Communication Studies since 1998. Rowland received the Bernard Fink Award in 1994 and the Kemper Award in 1996. In May 2000, he received the Louise Byrd Graduate Educator Award. He also was a finalist for the HOPE (Honor for the Outstanding Progressive Educator) award in 1991 and 1995. Rowland is an active researcher who in a recent survey of scholars in communication studies, was ranked as one of the 30 most active publishing scholars in the discipline. Along with David Frank of the University of Oregon, he is the author of a forthcoming book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, "Shared Land/Conflicting Identity: Symbolic Trajectories of Israeli and Palestinian Symbol Use." The book will be published this summer by Michigan State University Press.

Barbara Schowen earned her bachelor's degree from Wellesley College and completed her graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she received her doctorate in organic chemistry with a minor in biochemistry. In 1977, Schowen accepted part-time appointments in chemistry and biochemistry at KU. For the next 10 years she devoted her attention to undergraduate education, teaching courses and advising students in the two departments and carrying out research with the collaboration of a number of undergraduates. She was elected in 1988 to the Kansas Women's Hall of Fame and in 1997 received the Kemper award. In 1995, Schowen was promoted to professor and appointed associate chair for undergraduate studies in the Department of Chemistry. She was responsible for overseeing the department's undergraduate educational mission, organizing and running its undergraduate research programs and teaching courses in general and organic chemistry. She worked to establish honors sections in chemistry, to create and teach a senior-level undergraduate seminar course and to improve laboratory instruction and instrumentation, as well as to encourage and facilitate the involvement of numbers of undergraduate chemistry majors in meaningful research experiences in various departmental research groups. Schowen also serves as the director of the KU Honors Program, where she oversees a program for about 1,600 of KU's top undergraduate students in all academic disciplines.

Previous recipients of the award include:

1991 -- Allan J. Cigler (political science)
1992 -- Jack R. Cohn (English)
1993 -- Jack R. Porter (mathematics)
1994 -- J. Michael Young (philosophy, honors program)
1995 -- Sally Frost Mason (physiology and cell biology)
1996 -- Elizabeth C. Banks (classics)
1997 -- Laurence R. Draper (microbiology)
1998 -- Kathleen McCluskey-Fawcett (psychology)
1999 -- Norman Yetman (sociology, American studies)
2000 -- Craig Martin (ecology and evolutionary biology); Lloyd Sponholtz (history); Robert Antonio (sociology)
2001 -- Helen Alexander (ecology and evolutionary biology); John Colombo (human development and family life, psychology); Anita Herzfeld (Latin American studies)