Lindback

This past year, the Committee on Faculty was asked to study the eligibility for Lindback Teaching Excellence Award. The Committee on Faculty decided to go back to the sources, and the effort yielded a few interesting findings about the Award.

The official name of the foundation is “The Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation,” which in or prior to 1961 established the Awards at colleges and universities throughout Abbotts Dairies Inc.'s service area in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia.

We tend to call this award “Lindback Award,” “Lindback Teaching Award,” or “Lindback Teaching Excellence Award,” the Foundation refers to it officially as “Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award” and uses an acronym “LDTA.”

Over time, the Foundation’s policy and guidelines went through changes such as increase in the amount of stipend, eligibility, and the frequency of award. According to the Foundation’s letter in

1982, the stipends were to be between $500 and $1,000. In 1994 it jumped from $1,000 to $3,000, and since 2004 the award is now accompanied by a $4,000 grant at Villanova. With regard to eligibility, the letters stated that it was the Foundation’s intention that the awards be given to ‘members of the teaching staff’ or ‘a faculty member teaching students,’ without any regard to the tenure or tenure-track status or to the level of teaching, i.e., graduate or undergraduate. A new criterion was introduced in 2004, which specified the eligibility to encompass permanent, part-time (at least half-time) faculty members as long as he or she served as a faculty member in the preceding three years.

The Foundation is particular about the award being not supplemented with funds from any other sources and about the awards being called “The Lindback Distinguished Teaching Awards,” and not using that name for any other prize of honor awarded by the institution.

The Faculty Congress decided this past year that ‘all’ full-time faculty members were eligible for the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award, whether tenured or on the tenure-track or otherwise.

As a sidebar, each university or college in the region seems to give one LDTA each year, but eight awards are given at University of Pennsylvania to its “teacher/scholar” faculty members each year. In 1988 the Provost’s Award was established at University of Pennsylvania to honor excellence in teaching by non-tenure faculty and staff.

Q Chung, COF Chair