Zammito Awarded Prize for Excellence

Zammito Awarded Prize for Excellence

BY DAVID KAPLAN
Rice News Staff
May 13, 1999

Typically, during the last few minutes of a class Hanszen College senior Morgan Robinson can hear the rustle of backpacks as students get ready to bolt. But when it’s the closing moments of a class taught by Associate Professor of History John Zammito, she says, “we just sit there stunned and hanging.”

As a sophomore she took Zammito’s “European Intellectual History” course and recalls that he gave brilliant, riveting 50-minute lectures without using notes. “It’s all in his head,” she says. “The whole history of the world is in there some place.”

Zammito has won the 1999 George R. Brown Prize for Excellence in Teaching, Rice’s most prestigious teaching award. Alumni who graduated two and five years ago vote on the $6,000 prize.

A Zammito course can have an impact: “It was like opening my eyes to the world,” says Hanszen junior Hadi Tabbaa. For Hanszen College junior David Zetoony, it was both gripping and intellectually demanding: “I’d have to mull over everything we talked about in class for hours and hours,” he says.

Says Professor of English Alan Grob, a past winner of the award, “There’s nobody I admire more. I can’t say how remarkable Jack is.” Marveling at Zammito’s grasp of art, philosophy and literature, Grob observes: “He teaches courses on subjects you’d wonder if he could get 10 students for, and he gets 50. These students follow him like the Pied Piper.”

Students have been known to applaud after a Zammito lecture, but his effectiveness as a teacher goes beyond his ability to make things interesting: It’s also the love and admiration that flows between teacher and student.

In his 10 years at Rice, Zammito has been a faculty associate at Hanszen College, and on any given day at the lunch hour, you’ll find him in the dining hall surrounded by students. They generally revere him but feel free to tease and be teased. They talk Nietzsche, movies and basketball.

Teaching, like basketball, involves going “one-on-one,” Zammito says. “It doesn’t come from a pedestal. You’ve got to be a person.” What’s important, he says, “is just spending time with them and taking them seriously as people.”

A year out of college, he was working as an economist for a stock brokerage firm in Memphis, Tenn. At the office, he’d think to himself that he’d rather be reading philosophy. He went back to school, studying intellectual history at the University of California&endash;Berkeley.

After graduating, he became an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas where he won the Jean Holloway Award, one of the school’s most prestigious teaching prizes. Later, at St. John’s School in Houston, he won the Texas Excellence in Teaching Award for being one of the top 10 secondary school teachers in the state.

While at St. John’s, he wrote “The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment,” named one of the best academic books of 1992 by Choice, the journal which reviews academic works.

His research area is European intellectual history, primarily German idealism and romanticism, and he refers to his course European Intellectual History: From Bacon to Hegel as “my baby.” Another of his favorites is Huma 101 and 102 (Introduction to Humanities), which he has taught since he’s been at Rice.

Noting that he feels complete support from the Rice administration, colleagues and students, Zammito says “I love Rice and am completely devoted.”