Four collegiate professors named in recognition of teaching, scholarship

University of Michigan-Dearborn has named four faculty members as collegiate professors in recognition of their scholarship and teaching. Collegiate professors are among those who demonstrate leadership in their departments or divisions, colleges, or the university as a whole.

• Richard E. Czarnecki Endowed Collegiate Professorship: Brian Green, professor of accounting, Department of Accounting and Finance, College of Business
• Michael Foran Collegiate Professorship: Barbara Klein, professor of management information systems, Department of Management Studies, College of Business
• Helen Mataya Graves Collegiate Professorship: Suzanne Bergeron, professor of women’s and gender studies and social sciences, Department of Social Sciences and College-Wide Programs, College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters
• Dorothy Lee Collegiate Professorship: Carolyn Kraus, professor of journalism and screen studies, Department of Language, Culture, and Communication, College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

The professorships are named in honor of distinguished past members of the faculty and represent one of the most significant awards that the university bestows upon members of its faculty.

Brian Green is the current senior-most faculty member in the College of Business and also serves as the director of the College of Business’s Executive Speaker Series. Joining the College of Business in 1992, Green teaches undergraduate courses in auditing, managerial accounting, and government and non-profit accounting, and graduate courses in financial and forensic accounting.

An active researcher, he has published extensively in the areas of management fraud detection and assessing effective teaching, including two co-authored books, A Framework for Encouraging Effective Teaching and Best Practices in Outcome Assessment.

Green has been a leader in the Department of Accounting and Finance and the College of Business, especially in mentorship and service. In honor of Professor Czarnecki’s legendary record of teaching at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Green has made tremendous contributions to teaching and his focus on students has had a positive effect on students beyond his own classroom.

His awards include the College of Business Teacher of the Year award in 2016, the College of Business Distinguished Performance in Research award in 2014, State of Michigan Distinguished Professor award in 2011, the Michigan

Associate of CPA’s Distinguished Achievement in Accounting Education award in 2009, the Michigan Associate of CPA’s Accounting Educator of the Year award in 2003, and the UM-Dearborn Distinguished Faculty Research award in 2000. In 2006, he was honored with the American Accounting Association President’s Region Award for two decades of service in national and regional leadership roles.

Barbara Klein has demonstrated leadership at multiple levels in her 21 years at the College of Business. She is a productive scholar of focused and high-quality research in information technology, with 36 peer-reviewed publications and 35 peer-reviewed conference papers. She serves as an associate editor for three journals and on the editorial boards of two more journals.

During her tenure, Klein has taught 14 different courses and developed eight new classes. As the senior member of her discipline, she has significantly shaped the vision of the revised MIS undergraduate concentration and the MS in information systems. Students seek her out for independent studies and honors projects, and she has completed 21 of these in her time at the College of Business. Students appreciate the structure she provides in her classes, and her ability to connect and place students at ease.

She also has shown leadership in service, as indicated by her receipt of the 2016 UM-Dearborn Distinguished Service Award. She has held significant roles, such as Faculty Senate chair (2011), and leadership on Vision 2020 steering committees (2012-2015). She was a key member of the committee that developed the Dearborn Discovery Core.

As the first female faculty member in the College of Business to become a full professor in 2011, she also serves as an important role model for many female junior faculty members.

Colleagues say Klein is naturally curious, intelligent and well read in many areas, so she is able to hold engaging conversations with a wide range of people. She is highly collaborative and spends time mentoring others. Her collaboration can be seen in her publication record, in which she has regularly co-authored with junior faculty. She has conducted both formal and informal mentoring for colleagues preparing for promotion and tenure, and for teaching. She is also a skilled communicator and consensus-builder, which makes her a valuable addition to committees.

Suzanne Bergeron’s record of scholarship includes the book Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender and the Space of Modernity. This book was part of a larger project, including an influential article in Signs, to challenge the gender bias and essentialism of dominant representations of the nation and the global in economic theory and practice.

In 2005, Bergeron’s work shifted to a focus on the ways that assumptions about gender and sexual norms in economic theory made it complicit in invisibilizing and pathologizing LGBTQ persons and essentialized images of women as natural careers in development policy. This work was published in the journal Frontiers, a leading edited collection on Sexual Rights and Global Governance, International Feminist Journal of Politics and an influential collection Feminist Economics and the World Bank.

Bergeron then turned her attention to understanding the possibilities and limits of the “business case” for investing in women that is now the guiding principle for gender policy at the World Bank and United Nations. Bergeron is considered a leading international scholar on the complexities of the “business case” model in development. Her most recent work, which is nurtured by her affiliation with the Community Economies Research Network and the Women on the Verge collective, aims to bring to light and support feminist and post-capitalist alternatives to the “business case.”

Bergeron’s contributions to the campus through teaching and leadership have focused on the development of the Women’s and Gender Studies (WGST) program and on gender equity issues on the campus. She was the founding director of the Women in Learning and Leadership (WILL) program in 2004 and was instrumental in creating the major in WGST. Her leadership of the LGBTQ Task Force led to the creation of an LGBTQ coordinator and the eventual hire of an expert in this field to develop classes for the campus. She has organized approximately 100 events at UM-Dearborn, from conferences to national speakers to workshops to film series, since her arrival on campus in 1998. Most recently she contributed academic, research-focused programming to the campus conversation on sexual assault awareness and prevention. She also is a highly regarded and much sought out mentor, and her efforts in this regard have been critical in fostering the development of many faculty across the university.

In addition to her leadership and teaching in WGST, Bergeron also co-chaired the General Education task force that led to the current Dearborn Discovery Core Curriculum, was a member of the Experiential Education task force, was a lead member of the CASL Strategic Planning group, and was on the steering committee of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender in Ann Arbor, among other service contributions.

Carolyn Kraus has taught full-time at UM-Dearborn for 42 years. While maintaining a program of strong and steady publication throughout her years as both a lecturer and professor, she has offered more than 250 undergraduate courses and five graduate courses.

Already well published before assuming a tenure-track position in 2000, she has since then published 38 examples of literary and cultural criticism and narrative nonfiction, as well as a collaborative book and three collaborative documentary films. In addition, she led the creation of an innovative new discipline and major (journalism and screen studies—JASS); developed a large experiential learning program in the College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters; initiated all writing courses in a summer academic support program; developed most of the school’s journalism courses; taught as a volunteer in three different prisons and as a guest instructor in South Africa and Taiwan; shepherded countless students toward publishing their work; and doubled the funds available each year to reward student writing.

Kraus began her career at UM-Dearborn as an adjunct instructor, earned a doctorate and a tenure-track position well into her teaching career, and then used her experience as a working journalist to animate and inform her classes and her research. She also has made the concept of “story-telling” the hallmark of the JASS major she founded and the governing methodology for her work in and about the Detroit metropolitan area.

In addition to being a gifted and passionate writer with an impressive record of publications in venues of high stature, Dr. Kraus is a seasoned interviewer and project designer. She shares her process with students, pulling them into real-world research and problem-solving, helping them to explore and map the world they live in, under their creativity, empathy, and intellectual curiosity. She has involved students in the filming of her collaborative documentaries; included students as paid participants in her personal research grants; supervised many independent studies, as well as 14 graduate theses; secured grants for undergraduates; and supervised an honors transfer group student project. Over the years, she has guided many students toward publishing work begun in her writing classes.