Remarks about Award Winning Faculty Members

Dave Meyer

Arnie Millier, head of the Geology department, provided remarks about Dave Meyer during the May 12 Awards Presentation:

President Zimpher, Members of the Faculty, and Friends:

I am thrilled to be here today, to introduce Dave Meyer as this year’s recipient of the George B. Barbour Award.

It is probably inevitable that, on occasions such as this one, we have a tendency to look back and marvel at the passage of time, trying to remember when and where we met someone, and when they became important influences in our lives. In this case, I had a little bit of help jogging my memory, because it turns out that Dave and I became colleagues just a few months before the last cicada emergence, when I joined the faculty here during the 1986-87 academic year. Luckily, Dave and I were both in the Bahamas for a two-week stint during the height of the swarm that year, so this will our—or at least my—first real experience with this incredible event.

But it turns out that I got to know Dave a few years before I arrived at UC. I first got to talk with him one-on-one in 1982, when I was a graduate student at Chicago and, as luck would have it, we found ourselves sitting next to each other on a bus ride during a geological field trip in central Indiana. At that first encounter, I was struck by Dave’s willingness to chat with me at length on a wide range of subjects, even though I was a nobody. At the time, I certainly was not the kind of person who would walk up to eminent professionals and engage them in conversations, but, somehow, Dave helped me to overcome this shyness. When I interviewed for the job at Cincinnati some three years later, I already knew that Dave was someone I would truly enjoy working closely with, and I credit much of my own success at Cincinnati to his mentorship.

I bothered to describe my first encounter with Dave because, strikingly, several people who wrote letters in support of his nomination reported very similar experiences. Dave Meyer is a remarkably nice and generous person who goes out of his way to share his geological knowledge with anyone who seeks his guidance. But I don’t want to leave the impression that he sits in his office, simply fielding requests that come his way. More than just about anyone I know on the faculty, Dave is a proactive member of the community within and beyond the University and, given his expertise, it stands to reason that part of his activity in the community relates to geology. To note just a few examples, Dave has worked for years as a close advisor of a prominent local amateur organization of paleontologists, the Dry Dredgers; he has played a prominent role at regional geological expositions, such as the Cincinnati Gem and Mineral Show; he has advised the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History on a myriad of programs and exhibits; he routinely gives lectures to grade school audiences; and he has even advised the City of Sharonville on the development of a public fossil park.

What makes his extensive community involvement particularly relevant for the Barbour Award is that Dave has worked very hard to involve undergraduate and graduate students in virtually all of these efforts. This has played an extremely valuable role in the training and development of all of our students, especially given the growing importance attached at the University to community involvement and public awareness, as evidenced, for example, by the inclusion of a social responsibility plank in the general education initiative. Many of us in the Sciences have been scratching our heads about how to help our students become more socially aware and active. Dave has helped to show us the way.

In so many other ways, Dave has played a central role in mentoring a very large number of students at all levels who have gone on to successful careers in geology. He has an innate ability to help his students become genuinely excited about what they do. He routinely takes students with him on field trips to far-flung places in the tropics, where they get to share, in particular, his love for all sorts of things that live underwater. Of course, there is no substitute for this kind of expeditionary learning, but, just as importantly, the fully immersive, informal nature of these trips adds immeasurably to the sense of community in our program. And, regardless of the venue, Dave is a born optimist, and he is very effective at conveying a feeling of enthusiasm to his students.

Amazingly, despite the large amount of time he that he devotes to students and to the community, Dave has had quite a successful career as a research scientist, and he enjoys a strong international reputation among paleontologists. In fact, it is his basic knowledge about geology and fossils, so evident in his work, that adds to the richness of his encounters with a wide variety of people.

For nearly three decades, Dave Meyer has devoted his energies selflessly to the development and well-being of his students, formal and informal, at the University and throughout the Greater Cincinnati community. To my knowledge, he has never been recognized by the University for this work, not that he has ever given the slightest hint that he expects such recognition. This makes his receipt of the Barbour award all the sweeter.

It is my pleasure to introduce to you this year’s recipient of the Barbour Award, David. L. Meyer.

Vern Scarborough

Delivered by Lynne A. Schepartz, associate professor of anthropology

Vern Scarborough began his career at UC in 1988, and in the course of the last fourteen years he has produced five books and numerous articles, book chapters, and technical reports. Vern’s field of research is archaeology, and principally the study of the ancient Maya, but describing him as such does not do justice to the breadth and scope of his scholarly excellence and the impact of his research. More appropriately, he should be described as the leading scholar in the study of ancient and present-day water systems. The year 2003 was an especially good one for Vern’s scholarship, as several notable projects were published. The

Flow of Power

, from the School of American Research Press, showcases the global knowledge of water management that he has attained over the course of his career. In this work Vern presents a broad-based comparative study of present-day and ancient water management. He lays out a comprehensive theoretical basis for understanding the importance of regulated water systems for the development and sustaining of human societies and human economies. Another 2003 book, co-edited with Valdez and Dunning, is

Heterarchy, Political Economy, and the Ancient Maya

from the University of Arizona Press. The papers in this volume apply cutting-edge theoretical perspectives on heterarchy (that’s stratified and locally diversified systems of authority and management to the rest of us) to the Mayan region and challenges prior arguments that focused on strictly hierarchical models. Also among his accomplishments in 2003, Vern was solicited to write a leading commentary article for the

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

that he entitled “How to Interpret an Ancient Landscape”. These recent path-breaking books, articles and professional activities are the culminating efforts of a prestigious research program that is also reflected in Vern’s three earlier books:

Economic Aspects of Water Management in the Prehispanic New World

in 1993,

Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Volume III: The Settlement System in a Late Preclassic Maya Community

in 1991 and

The Mesoamerican Ballgame

, also in 1991.

Vern is also an active field worker with a history of research in Belize, Bali, the American Southwest and Pakistan. He has received a large number of grants and has a strong record of external research and scholarly awards. These include an extremely competitive and sizeable multi-year field research award from the National Science Foundation and a highly coveted Weatherhead Fellowship from the School of American Research in Santa Fe.

One outstanding aspect of Vern’s scholarship is his appreciation of the benefits of cross-disciplinary perspectives and collaborative research. He has a long-term and productive collaboration with Nick Dunning of UC’s Department of Geography. His research with Stephen Lansing, a University of Arizona cultural anthropologist studying the social and ritual organization of Balinese society, resulted in several co-authored papers on ritual and water regulation in that complex rice cultivation system. Vern also forged a strong intellectual bond with our colleague cultural anthropologist Barry Isaac (now Professor Emeritus), and this resulted in the often-cited

Economic Aspects of Water Management in the Prehistoric New World.

As these accomplishments attest, Vern is one of the leaders of his profession and a valuable colleague to international scholars and those of us at UC. I am pleased to recognize his record of scholarly excellence with the George Rieveschl Award for Outstanding Creative and Scholarly Works.