Director of University Honors Program Monica McAlpine
To Receive 2002 Chancellor’s Distinguished Service Award

(Boston, MA) Monica McAlpine will receive the 2002 Chancellor’s Most Distinguished Service Award at the University of Massachusetts Boston commencement exercises held on Saturday, June 1, at the Bayside Exposition Center, 10:30 a.m. Professor McAlpine is known for her commitment to her students and dynamic leadership in directing the University Honors Program.

Professor McAlpine is recognized for her “spectacular record of services” by the award selection committee and her peers. Since her involvement in the Honors Program in 1994, McAlpine has worked tirelessly to promote the program and its students. She says, “My goals are to develop opportunities that would help ensure the campus is meeting the needs of all its students and to help the campus better communicate the potential and achievements of all its students.”

During her tenure as director of the Honors Program, she increased recruitment efforts and quadrupled the program’s original membership to 165 by the fall of 2001. In addition, she worked to improve the academic quality and member diversity of the student population admitted to the program and helped to revive the Robert H. Spaethling Prize to recognize outstanding performance in the program.

She also has worked successfully with a number of students in fellowship applications.

In two years of scholarship competition, four out of six UMass Boston honors students have received Fulbrights, and almost every UMass Boston student that has applied for major scholarships, such as the Rhodes, Fulbright, or Marshall, has reached the semi-finals or finals in scholarship competition. Two 2002 honors students received Fulbright fellowships to study in Japan and the United Kingdom.

In addition to extensive in-service training with the National Collegiate Honors Council, McAlpine secured three grants to support the program, which helped to fund projects to strengthen undergraduate research, develop new student orientation and fellowship consultancy, and produce a new honors handbook.

Most recently, McAlpine guided the program as it underwent a rigorous, multi-level application process to quality and receive Commonwealth Honors Status. The external review committee which interviewed UMass Boston students, faculty, and administration praised the university for “a thriving and successful honors program characterized by phenomenal course offering unique to the program, a dedicated and supportive faculty working to create new educational opportunity for students, [and] a diverse, talented and energetic group of students.”

She has taught at the university since 1968 in the English Department. McAlpine received her Ph.D. and M.A. in English from the University of Rochester and her B.A. in English in Nazareth College.

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