For the last seven years, Dr. Tom Barden has helped create the strongest academic experience for UT’s best and brightest students and led efforts to elevate the Honors Program to become the Honors College.
Dr. Tom Barden, dean of the Honors College, recently received a plaque from the Honors Student Council and college faculty and staff members in recognition of his dedication and service. He posed for a photo with Honors Student Council members, from left, Eddie Cosma, Joe Knaggs, Michael Baker, Taylor Browning, Nicole Sherry, Zachary Reaver and Brock Wysong.
“I can hardly express how satisfying this job has been for me,” Barden wrote to honors students, faculty, alumni and friends in the most recent Honors College electronic newsletter. “To my thinking, it is simply the best position a professor can have. It has been such a privilege to work with some of our brightest and best faculty and most talented and dedicated students.
“Our goal as professors is to guide students to become critical thinkers, clear and precise writers, effective researchers and creators, ethically and socially aware citizens, and nuanced appreciators of science, history, literature, language and the arts. And working with all of you … for the past almost seven years, has brought me as close to that ideal as I have ever been,” he wrote.
Barden will continue in his role as editor of The University of Toledo Press and will return to the classroom to teach a graduate seminar on John Steinbeck during spring semester. Earlier this year, Barden published Steinbeck in Vietnam, a complete collection of the dispatches American novelist John Steinbeck wrote as a war correspondent for Newsday magazine.
