Faculty Member Honored with Governance Award
The Arts & Sciences Award for Faculty Governance honors faculty members who devote special efforts to helping their colleagues through committee memberships and other services to departments, programs, Arts & Sciences, and William & Mary.
Typically, one award is made to a tenured faculty member with no more than ten years' service and one to a tenured faculty member with more than ten years' service.
Sue Peterson
Written by Michael Tierney
George & Mary Hylton Professor of International Relations
I nominate Sue Peterson for the A&S Award for Faculty Governance. It is an easy letter to write since Sue has done more in this lane (and done it very well) than anyone else I know in A&S. I was baffled (and a bit embarrassed) to learn that she had not yet won this award after a long career contributing to faculty governance at the highest level.
While she has an excellent record of research and teaching, Professor Peterson has always been the most “other regarding” colleague I’ve had since coming to W&M. She thinks of others before she thinks of herself. People with that disposition end up serving in important governance roles either because they gravitate to them, or because their colleagues recognize this disposition and elect them to serve in such positions. In the case of Sue Peterson it is both. She really does enjoy solving problems for other people while maintaining institutional standards and she is routinely selected for and elected to important positions on faculty committees.
Professor Peterson has served on almost all the major elected committees in Arts & Sciences. She has served on (and Chaired) the Retention, Promotion & Tenure Committee, the Nominations and Elections Committee, International Studies Committee, Faculty Assembly (including three committees), and dozens more. She is routinely asked to represent the faculty on major committees reviewing senior administrators and other departments and programs. Beyond the “big” committees, she has served on and helped to create many workshops and ad hoc committees that assist colleagues who are entering into service positions. This is especially true in the later part of her career where she is seen by her more junior colleagues as a repository of wisdom about service and governance.
I will close with a short story that is not about a faculty committee, but about Sue’s generosity of spirit, since that is what has caused her to serve on every major committee in A&S and get unanimously elected by her colleagues in the Government Department for her current position as Department Chair. About ten years ago when Sue was still in the Dean’s Office we had a colleague whose husband died in a tragic car accident. Many people assisted this colleague in her time of grief, but Sue led this effort from the first day and she persisted in helping this colleague for years after most people had moved on with their lives. Sue taught this bereaved colleague how to organize a funeral, how to manage her own finances, how to reconceive her professional life so that she could raise three sons, and how to manage the bureaucracy of the university, insurance companies, and state agencies. She put in more hours than anyone else even though she likely had fewer hours to give. I’ll never forget the time I was dropping off something at this colleague’s house about two months after the death of her spouse. Sue Peterson was on her hands and knees on the kitchen floor cleaning a house that had not been cleaned since the death of this colleague’s spouse. That does not show up on a CV, but this “other regarding” spirit is exactly the same thing that caused Sue to do all the governance work that is clearly documented on her CV.
