Professors Hutchens and Lieberwitz Honored

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Professors Robert Hutchens and Risa Lieberwitz were named the winners of the 2019 MacIntyre Awards for Teaching and Advising at the ILR School’s 26th McPherson Honors and Awards Dinner, held this spring on the Cornell campus.

Established in 1994 by alumni to recognize excellence in undergraduate teaching and advising by ILR faculty members, the award is named in honor of emeritus Professor Duncan MacIntyre, a member of the Labor Economics department from 1950 until his retirement in 1975.

Robert Hutchens

Hutchens is a Professor in the Department of Labor Economics, specializing in labor economics, public finance, and econometrics. He currently teaches the required labor economics course, Economics of Wages and Employment, but has also taught courses on the Economics of the Welfare State and on Income Distribution.

A member of the faculty since 1975, Hutchens believes that economics provides a window into human behavior, a perspective that is interesting and useful, and he strives to help students look through that window and perhaps share his fascination with what they learn. Hutchens wants students to engage with the course material, and to question and argue. To accomplish this, he continues to experiment with new and different ways of helping students learn about labor economics.

In recent years Hutchens has added active learning segments, included flipped classes, to his courses. He uses problem sets, low-stakes quizzes, and practice exams to give students a sense of skills mastered and skills that need work. Finally, several times during the semester he asks students to provide feedback by filling out a form with columns labeled start, stop, and continue. This feedback mechanism provides ideas about small changes to improve the class.

According to one of his student nominators, “Professor Hutchens understood that each year students have different wants and needs and he was open to whatever suggestions we had for ways of improving his course. The amazing thing was, he listened to every single suggestion, no matter how seemingly small or insignificant, because it truly mattered to him.”

Risa Lieberwitz

Lieberwitz is a professor of in the Department of and Employment Law, as well as an associate in the Worker Institute at Cornell and a co-director of the Cornell University Law and Society minor. She teaches a wide range of courses, including Labor and Employment Law, Constitutional Aspects of Labor and Employment Law, Employment Discrimination Law, Arbitration, and Theories of Equality and Their Application in the Workplace. Her research addresses these areas, with a current focus on academic freedom in higher education.

Professor Lieberwitz came to East Hill in 1982 and since that time has worked to “create a classroom in which students are excited about ideas.” She seeks “to build a solid foundation of students’ competence in legal analysis and in applying their analysis to current events and hypothetical fact situations.”

Lieberwitz encourages active class discussions in all her classes, whatever the size, often by presenting hypothetical situations for students to address. In this dynamic classroom atmosphere “legal concepts, principles and arguments are developed through questions, response and debates.”

Many student nominators described Lieberwitz as engaging and encouraging of differing viewpoints, with one stating, “Professor Lieberwitz empowers her students to express themselves and use their voices, no matter what they believe; although she may not always agree with a stated opinion or thought, she has always ensured that there was a safe and respectful setting in which any opinion or thought could be voiced.”