President's award, Charles P. Gallmeier

"Professor Gallmeier has shown enormous confidence in our students’ potential, dared them to dream and helped them turn their dreams into reality."

—Stephanie Shanks-Meile, professor and chair of the IU Northwest Department of Sociology and Anthropology

There’s little Charles Gallmeier won’t do in the name of teaching, and when administrators at IU Northwest began seeking faculty for Swingshift College, an outreach program offering classes to steel workers in local mills, they looked no further than Gallmeier.

As a noted ethnographer and scholar whose data-gathering forays have led him to urban crack houses and the locker rooms of professional hockey teams, Gallmeier funnels his passion straight to his students. His lectures draw on current events, his research experiences and his own life experiences to illustrate theories and concepts—and to eliminate the barrier between professor and student. Doing so sparks students’ “sociological imagination,” a Gallmeier goal.

Gall-meier’s entertaining and lively teaching methods are legendary. In discussing gender role socialization, for example, Gallmeier devoted an entire class period to the magic of role-playing. Two women became “men” having a conversation about a big date, while a man became a “woman” walking across the classroom the way he imagined a woman would walk. While the results are hilarious, students gain insight into how others perceive their actions and words.

Gallmeier advises the Sociology Club and Alpha Kappa Delta, the International Sociological Honor Society. In 2000, he co-chaired the Midwest Student Sociology Research Conference. By all accounts, the conference was one of the most successful and best attended in its history.