Chair installations evoke personal reflections for faculty

Lawrence O. Picus and Gale M. Sinatra have been installed in endowed positions at USC Rossier.

In a ceremony this August, the school installed Picus as the Richard T. Cooper and Mary Catherine Cooper Chair in Public School Administration, and Sinatra as the Stephen H. Crocker Professor of Education.

In prepared remarks, Provost Michael Quick praised academic chairs as the highest ranking a professor could attain, and a moment to be celebrated.

“I know you represent the best of what it means to be a faculty member: Dedication to advancing knowledge, passion for disseminating knowledge and commitment to service to our university community and to the world,” Quick said.

Those words rang true in many ways for both: For Picus, as a co-author, with Allan Odden, of one of the country’s most seminal works on school finance. For Sinatra, as an expert in science learning who now presides over the educational psychology division of the American Psychological Association.

But both also found the day’s major significance striking them in personal ways.

“This marks 30 years since I signed my first contract as an assistant professor,” Picus said. “About a week into my new job I realized that it was the best job in the world, and 30 years later, I wake up every morning and feel exactly the same way.”

“I never imagined I’d have the opportunity to go to college,” Sinatra said. One summer during high school, she explained, she took a job working in a factory, and it pushed her to ask a counselor about higher education, which would make her the first in her family to go to college. “It seems so unlikely to me that I’m standing with you right here.”

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