While the argument between the importance of research versus the importance of teaching rages on, each year NIU rewards three professors for excellence in teaching. The Presidential Teaching Professorship awards are given to three professors who show outstanding qualities in teaching.

Mary Suzanne Schriber, John Niemi, and Jerry Johns have impressed enough students and faculty members with their teaching skills to win the Presidential Teaching Professorship awards this year. Each will receive a $2,000 increase in base salary, a $5,000 allowance for teaching-related expenses and one semester off for research.

Schriber, a professor of English, exemplifies all of the qualities that a student is looking for in a teacher. Schriber said she has the communication skills needed to make the classics of American Literature come alive for her students. In fact, Schriber said communication is what she considers essential in all areas of life. “The better we are at it, the richer our lives are going to be from very practical matters all the way up to enjoyment of the arts,” she said in an interview Thursday afternoon.

Schriber, a self-proclaimed feminist, said she is concerned with the use of language. “It is about the most central thing in our lives and then I think that secondly, language is very much implicated in gender.

“Gender is very implicated in language so the two things work for me sort of hand-in-hand,” she added.

“As I focus with my students on the impact of language, one of those impacts has to do with the way in which the words that we use have certain gender conceptions built into them and consequently our conceptions of ourselves and other people that flow in our language are inevitably influenced by gender.”

In curriculum, Schriber said she believes that while “it has been proficiently documented that women writers and women’s perspectives have not been attended to the degree that men’s have,” she makes a real effort in her teaching not to eliminate what are taken to be “master works.”

Instead of elimination, Schriber said her purpose is exactly the opposite—to include everybody. She said she does this by including black and female authors who used to be left out of curriculum.

When assigning papers in her classes, Schriber said she tells her students, “It isn’t enough just to write to be understood. You must write so clearly that a reasonable person cannot misunderstand you.”

For example, Schriber said she tries to give her students all the possible choices for a word and have them understand the impact of each choice.

“I also talk about the inescapable fact that language goes out in areas of politics of language. Whether we like it or not is irrelevant,” she said.

Schriber has taught in China and at Oxford University in England. She studied as a Fulbright scholar in Paris and described herself as a Francophile. Her favorite author is Edith Wharton, and she said one of the high points of her career was last year when she delivered a paper on Wharton in Paris.

Schriber has been at NIU for 25 years and said she plans on remaining here until the end of her career. She said it is her “first and last” university.