Launching a Japanese program at a liberal arts college in the nineteen eighties was considered audacious, but with your guidance it became instead auspicious. You not only helped develop the Williams program, but have served for many years as its coordinator and brought to it all of its current faculty members. Japanese is a difficult language for most Westerners, and your students attribute their success in it to the combination of your being both very demanding of them and very generous with your time and attention. In your teaching, you were an early adopter of multimedia, introducing video and podcasts long before they became fashionable. Much of your scholarly work has analyzed the efficacy of various modes of Japanese language pedagogy. You have also researched the role of social factors in the acquisition of language. And you have explored some of the complex issues that come into play when we try to communicate across cultures. What more important research can there be in our current world than that? Those very skills are what have made you so successful in the historic role you have played in opening our culture here at Williams to the East.
I hereby declare you Professor of Japanese, Emerita, entitled to all the rights, honors, and privileges appertaining thereto.
June 3, 2012