Cal State L.A. Outstanding Professors, 1997-1998
California State University, Los Angeles has recently honored its 1997-1998 Outstanding Professors. The award recipients are: Culver City resident Marie Kathleen Boss, professor of Finance and Law; Yorba Linda resident Evelyn Calvillo, professor of Nursing; San Juan Capistrano resident Sharon Johnson, professor of Education in the Division of Administration and Counseling; and Altadena resident Edward Malecki, professor of Political Science. These awards are made primarily for excellence in teaching, but significant achievements are expected in scholarly inquiry or creativity, professional activities, and service to the campus and community.
As part of the annual faculty tradition, Cal State L.A. selected poet and professor of English Timothy Steele, a Los Angeles resident, as the recipient of the President's Distinguished Professor Award. This award recognizes superlative teaching and exceptional commitment to students as well as professional accomplishments and services. Only those professors who have previously been selected as Outstanding Professors are eligible for this award.
Marie Kathleen Boss, Professor of Finance and Law, School of Business and Economics
Marie Kathleen Boss graduated from UC Hastings College of Law and had an active, 11-year practice as an attorney in Los Angeles with emphasis on corporate transactional work and litigation. She joined the Cal State L.A. faculty in 1987.
Between 1986 and 1997, Boss produced 13 publications that appeared in conference proceedings in areas related to American and German regulation of insider trading and to the European Community directive regulating insider trading. Her many publications have appeared in the Journal of Business and Management, the Anglo-American Law Practice, and in the proceedings of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business and, among many others, the Southwest Regional Business Law Association. She also has to her credit 24 national and international presentations, which include an address to a delegation of businesswomen from the People's Republic of China and an invited lecture at UCLA in German to a group of upper-division German students on the regulation of insider training in the European Union and the United States. She has been an active member of the California State Bar since 1974, she was admitted to United States Supreme Court in 1980, and was an arbitrator for the American Arbitration Association, from 1984 to 1991.
In 1995, Boss received funding from the University Awards and Leaves Program in support of research comparing American and German students' evaluation of European and American regulation of insider training. The result of this research was an ongoing Cooperative Learning Teaching Project in the areas of international law and taxation.
Boss has served on numerous University, school and department committees, including the Academic Senate, the Faculty Policy Committee and, among several others, the School of Business and Economic's Reaccredidation Self-Study Report Committee. She has also served on the University Sabbatical Leave Committee three times, as both a member and chair of the School's Faculty Affairs Committee, and as chair of the Dean Search Committee in 1996-1997.
Evelyn Calvillo, Professor of Nursing, School of Health and Human Services
Evelyn Ruiz Calvillo received her bachelor's degree from University of Texas at Galveston, achieving a record of distinction in her studies through the National Dean's List and the Clinical Excellence Award. In 1991, she became the first Hispanic in the State of California to earn a doctorate in the field of nursing at UCLA.
Calvillo joined the Cal State L.A. Department of Nursing in 1990, where she has taught 16 different courses including clinical and theory lower and upper division courses in the areas of medical surgical nursing, pathophysiology, nursing research, and professional issues. She also teaches nursing theory in the graduate program. Between 1992 and 1996, concurrent with her faculty appointment, she was associate director of Educational Programs of the Edward R. Roybal Institute for Applied Gerontology on the Cal State L.A. campus. In addition, she was the coordinator of the Gerontology Certificate Program. In 1993, Calvillo was appointed to the Orange County HIV Task Force by the county supervisors, and in 1994, she was named one of the "Top Ten Nurses of the Year" in NurseWeek, a highly regarded periodical subscribed to thousands of nurses in California. She received the Dr. Ildaura Murillo Rhode Award for Educational Excellence, which was presented at the 1995 annual conference of the National Association of Hispanic Nurses in Austin, Texas. More recently, she was invited by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to join the Nurse Leadership 1997 Invitational Congress.
At present, she is the co-project director of "Learning Community for Underrepresented Nursing Majors," funded by both the California Area Helath Education Center Project and the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, to assist underserved prenursing majors to enter into the nursing program at Cal State L.A. She is also the co-investigator and project coordinator of a three-year research study on Hispanic patients recently diagnosed with Type II Diabetes, funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research under the National Institutes of Health.
Sharon Johnson, Professor of Education-Administration and Counseling, Charter School of Education
Sharon Johnson is currently coordinator for the Counseling and Educational Leadership Program within the Division of Administration and Counseling at Cal State L.A. She has consulted nationally and internationally with education and business organizations, as well as authoring and coauthoring more than 25 articles and books in the areas of parent/school partnerships; group counseling; program development and evaluation; management training; marriage, family and child counseling; career development and multicultural issues.
Johnson received her B.S. from UCLA, her master's degree in Counseling from Cal State Fullerton and her doctorate in Counselor Education from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She is a former elementary and secondary school teacher and school counselor, and was director of Pupil Services for the Howard County Public Schools in Maryland for ten years prior to joining the Cal State L.A. faculty.
Johnson is active in numerous international, national and state professional associations. She is currently president of the California Association for Counseling and Development, a leading force for representing professionals in the field of counseling, student personnel and mental health. Johnson takes particular pride in her current efforts to co-design and implement the California Counselor Leadership Academy. This training program emphasizes the need for consistent school guidance programs that benefit all students. In addition, she is working closely with the California School Counselor Association and the California Association for Counselor Educators and Supervisors to facilitate legislation to implement elementary school counselors in all public schools.
In her consultation work, Johnson and her husband Curly have authored a series of parent involvement modules and videotapes that have been used in training more than 6,000 families in 17 countries worldwide. She is a frequent keynote, motivational and dinner speaker. Johnson's research interests include family practices that support learning, urban school reform and school guidance program development and evaluation. She is currently working on a publication on "Results-Based Guidance Programs" and is a coauthor of a publication on "Pupil Service Programs in the Year 2018."
Edward Malecki, Professor of Political Science, School of Natural and Social Sciences
Edward Malecki received his B.A., M.A., L.L.B., and Ph.D. from University of Illinois-Urbana. He joined the Cal State L.A. faculty in 1967, and has been serving as chair of the Department of Political Science since 1993. During his 31 years at Cal State L.A., Malecki has taught a wide variety of lower and upper division courses, with consistent superior student evaluations. These included courses and seminars in quantitative methods of political science, political sociology, economy and public policy, American government, modern political theory, foundations of empirical political theory, and seminars in political theory and political behavior.
An active member of many professional organizations, Malecki has consistently been active as well in University, school and department committees. He is currently active in the University's Academic Senate on the executive and steering committees, and serves as chair of the Educational Policy Committee for the School of Natural and Social Sciences. He has published widely in many national and international journals, and co-edited the book, Group Politics: A New Emphasis (Scribners, 1972). He was the recipient of the Policy Studies Organization's 1997 Jeffrey Pressman Award for the best article published in the Policy Studies Review during 1996. A Charlers Merriam Fellow, he is also listed in Who's Who of America, Who's Who in the West and Who's Who in American Law.
Additionally, Malecki is active in state and local campaigns, believing that in order to teach politics, one must practice politics. He was president of the Pasadena-Foothill chapter of the ACLU for four years as a key member of various ad hoc committees dedicated to desegregating the Pasadena Unified School District, and served as a consultant to TELACU and the Urban League. In academic politics, he has chaired the New Caucus for Political Science, a national organization of political scientists that was and is dedicated to making the profession more relevant to the issue of the day, including civil rights and gender rights. At the regional level, he has served on committees concerned with improving the Status of Women in the discipline of political science.
A nationally-recognized poet and a 1991-1992 Cal State L.A. Outstanding Professor, Timothy Steele's honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Commonwealth Club of California Medal for Poetry, a California Arts Council Grant, and the Los Angeles PEN Center's Literary Award for Poetry. He has been the subject of an interview on National Public Radio, and his poems have been featured on Garrison Keiller's "Writers' Almanac."
In 1995, former CSU Chancellor Barry Munitz selected Steele's then just-published book of poems, The Color Wheel, as a gift book for presidents, trustees, staff, and friends of the CSU system. During that same year, Steele was the was the focus of a front page article in the "Life and Style" section of the Los Angeles Times that discussed his advocacy of metrical structures in poetry. Steele's earlier publication, Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter (The University of Arkansas Press, 1990), called attention to a poetic tradition that-founded on meter, rhyme and stanza-is represented in our modern era by poets J.V. Cunningham and Richard Wilbur. His book was judged by contemporary critics as "a carefully argued and lucidly written work of scholarship," and "a book of great acuity and breadth of knowledge." His poetry-known for colloquiality, and with themes ranging from love and death, to nature and meditations on culture-has appeared in several collections, such as Uncertainties and Rest (1979), Saphhics Against Anger and Other Poems (1986), The Color Wheel (1994), and Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986 (1995). Between 1983 and 1997, he produced 15 journal articles for such publications as The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry and The Brandeis Review. Within the same time period, he published 59 poems, many of them anthologized in widely-used college textbooks. He has also edited an edition of poems by J.V. Cunningham (1997).
Steele has been invited to read his poetry at Amherst College and at other universities and literary gatherings. He judged the Poetry Society of America's 1997 Emily Dickinson Contest, and has been an annual judge since 1991 for the Henri Coulette Memorial/Academy of American Poets College Poetry Prize for Cal State L.A. His forthcoming book, All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification, will be published by Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, Spring 1999.
Steele obtained a Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1977, and taught at Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles before joining the Cal State L.A. faculty in 1987. He has taught classes in the classical and medieval tradition, the history of literary criticism, classical rhetoric, and creative writing. In the last several years, he directed to completion six M.A. creative writing theses, and served on the committees of four M.A. theses in literature.
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