HAMMOND – Southeastern Louisiana University opened the 2023-24 academic year Friday (Aug. 11) with its fall convocation that included presentation of the President’s Awards for Excellence, the university’s highest honor for faculty and staff.
The event also included announcement of endowed professorships and scholarships, new faculty and staff, faculty tenure and promotion, emeritus/emerita recipients, and recognition of service awards to faculty and staff who have worked at the university for 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 and 45 years.
Receiving the President’s Awards for Excellence were Professor of Philosophy Jeffrey Bell, excellence in research; Professor of Physics Gerard Blanchard, excellence in teaching; Assistant Professor of IB Education Cherissa Vitter, excellence in faculty service, and Director of Upward Bound Ron Abel, excellence in unclassified staff service.
As a faculty member for 29 years, Bell has achieved an international reputation for his work on the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and has been an invited speaker at conferences in America, Asia, and Europe. Based on the strength of his work on bridging the analytic-continental divide, Bell was awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2019.
Blanchard began teaching at Southeastern in 1998, and his career has been one of continual growth. He has taught 34 different courses, which comprise the entire physics curriculum and service courses. This, he says, is important to the development of his teaching because he finds that teaching a topic at one level helps him to explain it at another.
A faculty member since 2015, Vitter is responsible for coordinating the International Education Programme. She has provided service at several different levels for the university, as well as service in the greater community surrounding Southeastern. She developed the International Baccalaureate certificate program that Southeastern now offers.
Abel’s first job at Southeastern was as an instructor in a grant program called Jobs Training Partnership Act, teaching dislocated workers and women entering the workforce how to use computers and bookkeep electronically. For over 25 years, he has worked in many leadership positions at Southeastern for TRIO programs, serving thousands of students from different backgrounds.
