NCHC Sam Schuman Award for Excellence at a Four-Year Institution
“Teachers need to love their subject matter,
and they need to love their students,
and they need to love bringing them together.”
-- Dr. Sam Schuman
NCHC is pleased to present the Sam Schuman Award for Excellence at a Four-Year Institution. Presented to an honors program director or faculty member at the NCHC Annual Conference, this award serves to recognize those who are making outstanding contributions to the honors community at four-year institutions.
Samuel Schuman, who passed away on November 11, 2014 left a legacy as an accomplished scholar, professor, and administrator. As the author of “Beginning in Honors” and an annual presenter at NCHC conferences and workshops, Sam exemplified the spirit of honors education and was passionate about sharing his love of honors with his students and peers. NCHC and the honors community owe Dr. Schuman their continuing gratitude for all that he contributed to the growth and development of honors.
Schuman Award winners will receive $500, along with an engraved plaque. The winner will be announced prior to NCHC's Annual Conference and awarded at the event.
Please complete the application below to nominate an outstanding honors director or honors faculty member for the NCHC Sam Schuman Award. The application requires detail about contributions to teaching in honors and involvement in honors beyond the home institution. A total of three letters of support, from the applicant’s institution as well as faculty colleagues or students, are required.
Please consider applying or nominating a deserving honors educator. NCHC is committed to recognizing our two-year college colleagues who strengthen honors education.
2024 Winner
The National Collegiate Honors Council announces Dr. Kate Bruce of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington as recipient of the 2024 NCHC Sam Schuman Award for Excellence at a Four-Year Institution. This award recognizes a four-year college honors director or faculty member for their outstanding contributions to the honors community.
Dr. Kate Bruce, University of North Carolina at Wilmington
“Is there anyone in NCHC who doesn’t know the calm and smiling presence of Dr. Kate Bruce? If anyone embodies the spirit, leadership, and service to Honors that Sam [Schuman] modeled, it’s Kate,” shares Dr. William Atwill, NCHC Fellow and former colleague of Dr. Bruce.
Since her arrival there in 1984, Kate has long been an agent of transformation at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. She became director of the UNCW Honors Scholars Program in 1999, serving twelve years in that role. In 2011, under her planning and direction, honors at UNCW was transformed with the foundation of the UNCW Honors College, over which she served as Founding Director—a position in which she remained for the following seven years (2011-2018). With the Honors Council, she also founded the UNCW Center for the Support of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (CSURF) under the umbrella of the Honors College to provide support for undergraduate scholarly activities of all UNCW students. Both before and throughout her nineteen years as head of honors at UNCW, she was well-known among her colleagues as one of her campus’ finest honors educators—so much so that she was named the 2008 North Carolina Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE).
A psychologist by training and in her scholarly research career, her honors seminars at UNCW ran the creative interdisciplinary gamut, crossing social, behavioral, and natural science boundaries with forays into anthropology, animal behavior, and evolutionary biology. She taught several honors study-abroad courses in Ecuador’s Amazon, Andean Mountains, and Galapagos Islands areas. Kate has also long been one of UNCW’s most prolific and skillful honors capstone/thesis project mentors, with a total of 27 total honors thesis completed so far under her direction.
Alongside her incredible career as an honors educator on her own campus, Kate has also been one of the most important forces in serving and shaping honors education nationally over the past quarter century. She is a former President of the NCHC (2006-2007), and elected member of the NCHC Executive Board (2001-2004). She was Program Chair for the NCHC’s annual meeting in Philadelphia in November 2005. She also served a term as President of both the Southern Regional Honors Council and the North Carolina Honors Association (which she has also served continuously as Treasurer for the past twenty-four years 2000-2024).
Dr. David Coleman, Executive Director of the Eastern Kentucky University Honors Program and fellow NCHC member, shares “With more than 25 years of experience in honors leadership on her own campus at UNC-Wilmington and more than two decades of leadership in state and regional honors organizations as well as the NCHC, [Kate] is well-known to all of us in honors education as one of our very best. It is certainly time to recognize this leadership, service, and consummate dedication to students and to honors education more broadly by awarding Kate the 2024 Sam Schuman Award for Excellence at a Four-Year Institution.”
2025 Nominations open March 1, 2025 and close June 15, 2025.
Applications are available via the form below or at this link.