Ambler Honored for Excellence in Teaching

“I’m retiring at the end of fall semester, so
this was my last possible chance to win,” said Ambler,
professor of political science.

But it’s not his first time to receive this honor,
which is the most prestigious teaching award at Rice. He
won it in 1994 too. The recipient is selected based on the
votes of alumni who graduated two and five years prior to
the year in which the award is given.

Alumni also have chosen Ambler for the George R. Brown Award
for Superior Teaching four times.

“I’ve gotten more pleasure from these teaching
awards than any other,” said Ambler, who’s been
a member of the Rice faculty since 1964.

His decision to become a teacher was “partly a process
of elimination,” he said. “I was pretty sure I
didn’t want to be an engineer or a physician, or a
lawyer or businessman. I liked speaking and being around
groups of people, so I taught high school for a year.”

That experience confirmed that he enjoyed teaching, but
he preferred a higher intellectual level, so he became a
teaching assistant and then an instructor at the University
of California at Berkeley while working on his Ph.D. But
the “highly bureaucratic” structure on a campus
of 27,500 students motivated Ambler to seek a smaller research
university “that took undergraduate teaching more seriously.”

Rice had the academic flavor he was craving, and he’s
been here ever since.

“The students at Rice are a delight to teach,”
he said, noting that the tremendous range in students’
ability that is often a problem at large state schools is
not something he has to worry much about at Rice. “All
the students here are bright. In almost every class I’ve
got a couple of students who are so good that I wonder if
they should be up in front doing the teaching.”

Ambler teaches an introductory course in comparative politics
and a course on Western European politics, including his
specialty, French politics in comparative perspective. He
also teaches a weekly seminar on comparative social and
education policy, with enrollment limited to 15 students
so that he can conduct the seminar in his home near campus,
which he has done for the past 30 years.

The two most critical ingredients to successful teaching,
according to Ambler, are preparation and enthusiasm. “If
you’re bored with the material, the students will pick
up on that,” he said. “You don’t have to
be a dramatic orator, but you have to convey the sense that
the material you are teaching is important and exciting.”

Both ingredients were demonstrated by two teachers who made
a lasting impression on Ambler. A history professor who
taught him at Willamette University in Salem, Ore., was
“a very gifted lecturer, always enthusiastic about
the subject and always available to advise students,”
Ambler said. “He was someone I wanted to emulate.”
A highly skilled professor of French, also at Willamette,
helped turn Ambler’s fulfillment of a language requirement
into a lifelong fascination with France. “Partly because
of her support, I won a Fulbright Scholarship to France,
where, upon being told that my intended field of study —
history — ended with the French Revolution, I became
a political scientist,” he said.

“For many years, John Ambler has been one of the finest
teachers at Rice, not just in the Department of Political
Science, but in the entire university,” said Cliff
Morgan, the Albert Thomas Professor of Political Science
and department chair. “His dedication to his students,
his profession and his university has served to inspire
the rest of us. Though few of us will reach John’s
level, we are all better teachers from associating with
him.”

Ambler’s former students come by frequently to update
him on their careers, and he’s been pleased to see
how successful they’ve been. Many have gone into law
or foreign service, “and occasionally something they
learned in my class turned out to be useful to them,”
he said.

The fact that alumni have singled out Ambler repeatedly
for his outstanding teaching suggests that he really loves
his work. His post-retirement plan suggests the same.