The Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award is one of Stanford University’s highest honors. Russell A. Berman, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities, was selected to receive the award in 2013. Named after the president of the Board of Trustees who served from 1953 to 1958, the Dinkelspiel Award will be presented at the university commencement on June 16.
The Dinkelspiel Awards recognize distinctive and exceptional contributions to undergraduate education and the quality of student life at Stanford. The contribution may be made for activities including curriculum design, program development, advising excellence, residential education, committee leadership, or extracurricular education.
Nominated by members of the Stanford community and selected by a committee of faculty, staff, and students, Berman was recognized “for more than three decades of excellence as a teacher and scholar at Stanford and as a national voice, working to re-envision humanities education in this time of transition.”
The award cited Berman “for his leadership in freshman education, in recent years guiding Stanford’s Introduction to the Humanities program through a series of major reforms and laying the groundwork for the redesign of the first year of undergraduate education in the Thinking Matters program,”. . . “for creating a strong teaching culture that has shaped a new cohort of dedicated undergraduate teachers at Stanford,” and “for his steadfast focus on the development and promotion of students–from first-term freshmen to graduate students–so that learning from him is ‘nothing short of unforgettable.’”
Berman specializes in the study of German literary history and cultural politics. He is a member of both the Department of German Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford. He has served in numerous administrative positions at Stanford. At Hoover, Berman is a member of the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.
Previous Hoover winners of the Dinkelspiel Award include Senior Fellow Larry Diamond in 2007, and David Brady, deputy director and Davies Family Senior Fellow, in 1992.
