Philosophy professor named best in Delaware

Alan Fox, associate professor of philosophy, was honored as the 2006 Delaware Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
The award is recognized as one of the most prestigious honors a professor can receive and is given on both state and national levels to university faculty who exhibit outstanding undergraduate teaching techniques.

Fox’s field in both his teaching and research is Asian and comparative philosophy and religion, focusing in part on Buddhism in China and India. He says he first became interested in Asian thought during a Chinese martial arts course he took in graduate school. He speaks Chinese fluently and spent a year in graduate study in Taiwan as a Fulbright Hayes Scholar.

In a statement required for the award, Fox wrote: “I love to teach. I love to get students to wake up and think for themselves, and so the excitement is still there in every class I teach.”

He added that he is including more multimedia computer support and other media resources in his courses but that “guiding my use of this technology and paraphernalia is my mission to cultivate what I feel is the students’ innate capacity to think clearly for themselves and to take responsibility for their own thinking. Among other things, this means they are encouraged to challenge the views of the author and instructor.”

By midsemester Fox says, he knows the names of all his students, which may number more than 300.

Fred Adams, chairperson of the philosophy department, who nominated Fox for the award, calls him a “fabulous teacher.”

“In the philosophy department, we ask students to rate professors on a scale of one to five, and Alan consistently gets a five rating from students, which is unusual,” Adams says. “One student wrote, ‘Fox rocks,’ and others praised him for opening their eyes to other religions and philosophies. I have visited his class to observe what was going on. He holds the class in the palm of his hand and keeps them on track in a nonthreatening way. His students are devoted to him, and several take as many classes of his as they can.”

Fox is working on a textbook based on a fundamental Chinese work, Dao De Jing, and is beginning another project to develop his world religions course into a hypertext multimedia computer textbook. He received UD’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 1995 and the College of Arts and Sciences’ Outstanding Teacher Award in 1999.