Long-time University trustee Michael J. Mungo has established a $10,000 Professor of the Year award on the Columbia campus—now USC’s highest undergraduate teaching award—and the monetary value of the other teaching awards that bear his name has been increased.
The inaugural Michael J. Mungo Distinguished Professor of the Year Award will be announced at the spring general faculty meeting. The award replaces the $2,500 Amoco teaching award, which has not been funded by the Amoco Foundation for several years.
In addition, the number of Michael J. Mungo Undergraduate Teaching Awards has been reduced from five to four and the monetary value of each award has increased from $2,000 to $2,500. Three of the awards are reserved for faculty in liberal arts and science and mathematics. The Mungo Graduate Teaching Award also has increased to $2,500.
“The USC Educational Foundation had been funding the Amoco award for some time, and I decided to ask Michael if he would help us replace that award,” said Jerry Odom, USC’s former provost who recently returned to his teaching position in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “I’ve never gone to Mr. Mungo with a reasonable request that he has refused.”
Previous Amoco winners likely won’t be eligible for the Mungo Professor of the Year Award, Odom said, but criteria for selecting the Mungo award will be the same as for the Amoco. Nominations can be made by students, faculty members, administrators, and alumni.
A plaque with the names of previous Amoco winners is displayed in the Thomas Cooper Library, and a similar plaque will display Mungo Distinguished Professor of the Year winners.
Mungo, a 1950 USC graduate who has been a University trustee for 32 years, already has provided funds for the 2005 awards and has arranged for his estate to fund the awards in perpetuity.
“I was a terrible student in high school, and several of my professors at USC just changed my whole life,” he said. “They gave me a passion for learning, and I could never be more grateful all these years later.”
Which of Mungo’s professors would have been recipients of the Professor of the Year Award?
“My most memorable professor was John B. McConaughy, a political science professor in the late 1940s and early ’50s who died tragically in mid career,” Mungo said. “He was an outstanding teacher with the ability to convey knowledge to his students. I benefited so much from his teaching.”
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Michael J. Mungo
