Here is how the Faculty Service Award works: The Faculty Council selects the honoree (in this case, Denise Daniels), and the award is announced at the year-end Faculty Banquet. The recipient receives a small gift, funded by Council members, and their name is added to a plaque that is displayed in the SUB. In addition, their picture is displayed on the plaque for one year.
Formal criteria for the award are pretty simple:
- The individual is a member of the SPU faculty.
- The award recognizes a pattern of ongoing service to the SPU faculty and university community as a whole over a period of years (typically 10 or more).
Although it is often the case that a specific service event might inspire the selection of a particular individual at a given moment, the goal of the creators of this award was that it look at a faculty member’s body of service within and to the SPU community over time.
The name given the award was also carefully chosen: faculty servant was specifically preferred over faculty service award. The first recipient of the award, Robert Chamberlain, was a prototype of the kind of person the faculty wished to honor, a person once called “a model of unselfish service.”
The award at times has been a type of “unsung hero” award, since a great deal of university service goes, if not unnoticed, at least unrecognized. Though well over half of the recipients have served as faculty chair – some more than once – this was never intended as a requirement. A faculty servant is one who has willingly served on faculty committees and task forces, has performed diligent work within his or her department and school, and has contributed in various other ways toward making SPU a better place. Work – even exemplary work – performed by a faculty member serving in some administrative role, such as department chair or dean, is not by itself enough to qualify him or her for this award, but it may be included in the assessment of his or her total body of service to the faculty and the university.