UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Carolyn E. Sachs, professor of rural sociology and women’s studies in College of the Liberal Arts, is the recipient of the 2016 Howard B. Palmer Faculty Mentoring Award.
The award honors and recognizes outstanding achievement by a faculty member with at least five years of service who effectively guides junior faculty. Howard Palmer was the senior associate dean of The Graduate School from 1984 to 1991.
It’s no surprise that Sachs is being honored for mentoring faculty, her colleagues said. After all, helping faculty advance — particularly women and minorities — is something she’s been doing for more than three decades.
“Over the years, literally dozens of faculty, graduate assistants, students and staff have spoken of their appreciation of Carolyn’s (Sachs) calm leadership as she mentors us through promotion, tenure, teaching concerns, research decisions and personal and professional crises,” said a colleague. “As someone who has directly benefited from her mentoring over the last 15 years, I’m never surprised by these expressions of gratitude and relief that someone so experienced and established in her field generously makes the time to listen and give sound advice.”
Colleagues praised Sachs for greatly diversifying the department, saying she has “a sincere interest in promoting and maintaining diversity in the department, not for the sake of diversity or a more tokenistic multiculturalism, but, because as an intersectional feminist, she is acutely aware of how categories of identity such as gender, sexuality and race intersect with power.”