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Distinguished Teaching Awards
David Domke
Erika Goldstein
James Green
John Peterson
Priti Ramamurthy
Barry Witham
Carol Zander

Excellence in Teaching Awards
Chia-Hui Huang
Steve Wolfman

Distinguished Staff Awards
Brian Davis & James Boeckstiegel
Gary Ausman
Felicia Hecker
Sandra Kroupa
Keith Ward

Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award
Thomas Daniel

S. Sterling Munro Public Service Teaching Award
Sergio Palleroni

Outstanding Public Service Award
Anita Ramasastry

Brotman Diversity Award
Business Educational Opportunity Program
Student Outreach Ambassador Program

Brotman Award for Instructional Excellence
Dance Program
Research Apprenticeship Program

Alumni Association Distinguished Service Award
Geoff & Judy Vernon

Alumna Summa Laude Dignatus
Donald Baker

UW Recognition Award
ARCS Foundation, Seattle Chapter

President's Medalist
Roy Chan

Barry Witham, Drama

Distinguished Teaching Award

The Distinguished Teaching Awards are given to University faculty who show a mastery of their subject matter, intellectual rigor and a passion for teaching

Barry Witham might have been a lawyer. After he’d earned a bachelor’s degree in English, he applied to Columbia University School of Law and was accepted.

“But I decided that my heart really wasn’t in it,” Witham says.

He might also have been an actor and director; in fact he had that in mind when he entered the master’s program in theater at the University of Iowa.

“But then I did summer stock on Cape Cod one year, met a woman and we got married,” Witham says. “Then we had a baby, and I decided I had to have more permanent income.”

Soon thereafter, Witham had a job at tiny Eureka College in Illinois, where he did everything. “I coached the debate team, I supervised the radio station. I directed and designed the plays. I taught public speaking, phonetics, Shakespeare, modern drama.”

To someone else, it might have been back-breaking drudgery far from the work he had set out to pursue, but to Witham it was “a wonderful kind of apprenticeship. That’s where I fell in love with teaching.”

He’s been teaching ever since, and doing it so well that this year he’s being honored for it. But he wasn’t always such an expert. “Can you imagine teaching all those different subjects?” he says of his time at Eureka. “I can’t believe that I was very good at it. I guess I learned there how little I knew.”

That sent him back to school to earn a doctorate in theater history, and then on to a career in academia — first at Miami University of Ohio and then at the UW.

Teaching, according to Witham, involves storytelling. “People remember stories,” he says. “I try to tell stories that illuminate what we’re reading or that draw parallels between what we’re reading and things that are happening.”

That some of his stories are memorable came through loud and clear when an article written for the English Journal arrived in Witham’s mail. In it, Tom Romano, a former student at Miami University who now teaches there, tells of attending a class of his on Waiting for Godot. He had been stumped by the play, Romano says, and waited for Witham to explain it. Instead, Witham told stories — stories about his father dying of a sudden heart attack when Witham was 8, about receiving a phone call that came to him at work after he was supposed to have left and which offered him an assistantship.

“Through Dr. Witham’s stories, I believe I understood intuitively the randomness and chaos that were part of existentialist philosophy (expressed in the play),” Romano wrote.

It’s the kind of conclusion Witham wants his students to search for. “What interests me as a historian is not such things as identifying a play’s genre,” he says. “What interests me is the way a play participates in the society that it’s a part of.”

In class, he teases this information out of his students “as if the Socratic method were a thing of nature, like plants and rivers and other unassailable facts, as if we had all gotten together in the same room to discuss books and artists in order to teach him a thing or two,” says Derek Davidson, a former student who now teaches at Ashland University. “He asks us, ‘Help me with this.’ And we do with gratitude, knowing that he is our Clarence Oddbody, our angel who by letting us help him is helping us immeasurably.”

“The biggest thing I’ve learned about teaching,” Witham says, “is that my job is not to tell students what I think, but to try to help them understand what they think.”

His efforts have won him great popularity. Drama School Director Sarah Nash Gates reports that students, when asked which courses have benefited them the most, routinely answer “any class with Barry.”

It must be his enthusiasm, intact despite his 30 years in the profession. Says Witham, “I feel terrifically fortunate and blessed, and I mean that genuinely, to have found a way to make a living that I enjoy. What’s my satisfaction? Just that I get to see a whole lot of my students succeed.”

– Nancy Wick,
University Week