The national Council for the Advancement and Support of Education began a program of selecting a national Professor of the Year in 1981. From 1981 through 1993, a single outstanding professor in undergraduate education was selected. In 1994 the program was expanded with assistance from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to provide four national Professor of the Year awards: for community colleges, baccalaureate colleges, master’s universities and colleges, and doctoral and research universities.
UT’s first winner, in 1985, when only one Professor of the Year was named, was William Marvin Bass, anthropology professor. He was selected from among nominees representing 141 institutions in the United States and Canada. Bass, a forensic anthropologist, achieved a national reputation for his research at UT on time-since-death estimates.
UT’s second winner—in 2006 for the Master’s Colleges and Universities category—was Donna C. Boyd, professor of anthropology at Radford University in Radford, Virginia. She earned her bachelor’s (1981), master’s (1984), and doctoral (1988) degrees in anthropology from UT.