The University plans to soon be the best Catholic teaching university in the West.
Eighteen reasons why that dream isn’t wild.

For more than a century the University of Portland has prided itself on its devotion to teaching — as art, craft, opening to epiphany, daily dedication, first among professorial virtues. Here talented teachers were celebrated, students reaped the copious benefits of their wizardry, and professors strove in ever more creative ways to bring their own remarkable scholarly feats into classrooms, labs, and conversations. The greatest among the faculty were those acclaimed the best teachers, by every measurement of that most mysterious and sometimes holy craft: enrollment, evaluations, reviews, accessibility, anecdote, excitement — even, in the most subtle compliment a student can give a teacher, the number of students inspired to become teachers themselves.

Seven years ago the University earned the first of four national teaching awards from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: the Oregon Professor of the Year Award, to biology professor Terry Favero (above right). Then came the deluge: U.S. Professor of the Year, to Spanish professor Kate Regan (left), Oregon Professor of the Year again, to biologist Becky Houck (second from left), and selection as a national Carnegie Scholar (communications studies professor Barb Gayle, second from right). The University’s four Carnegie award-winners became, understandably enough, widely celebrated for their teaching creativity and acumen.

But they are the tip of the iceberg at the University of Portland. Among the University’s 174 professors of every subject imaginable there are many other women and men of startling teaching ability — people who bring classrooms to life daily, who demand the very best of their students’ talents, who leap headlong into the subject at heart. Here, in the pages that follow, are seven of the University's best — and least-known — terrific teachers.

For more information about these ebullient exuberant exciting excited entertaining edifying educators, and myriad other matters of teacherly amazement, call the University's Office of Admissions, 503.943.7147, admissio@up.edu, www.up.edu.

Photographs by Jerry Hart