Dr. Mary Ann Schwartz has been married for 39 years. She earned her bachelor of arts degree in sociology and history from Alverno College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; her master’s degree in sociology from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago; and her doctorate in sociology from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She is Professor Emerita of Sociology and Women’s Studies and former chair of the Sociology Department at Northeastern Illinois University, where she cofounded and was actively involved in the Women’s Studies Program. She also served as a faculty consultant to the Network for the Dissemination of Curriculum Infusion, an organization that presents workshops nationally on how to integrate substance abuse prevention strategies into the college curriculum.
Throughout her educational experiences, Professor Schwartz has been concerned with improving the academic climate for women, improving student access to higher education, and improving the quality of undergraduate education. As a union activist, Professor Schwartz worked to win collective bargaining for higher education faculty in Illinois. She served as union president at Northeastern and spent more than eight years as the legislative director for the University Professionals of Illinois, where she lobbied for bills of interest to higher education faculty and students. She edited the union’s newsletter, Universities 21, which focused on academic issues. She continues to be active in the labor movement and served as an officer in the retirees’ chapter. Professor Schwartz is a Vice President of the Board of Directors of Lincoln Park Village, a nonprofit organization, whose mission is to enhance the quality of life and the well-being of individuals as they live longer so that they remain integral, vibrant, and contributing members of their communities.
Professor Schwartz’s research continues to focus on marriages and families, socialization, nonmarital lifestyles, work, aging, and the structured relationships of race, class, and gender. Although she found teaching all courses thought-provoking and enjoyable, her favorites were Marriages and Families; Women, Men, and Social Change; Sociology of Aging; and Introductory Sociology. In her teaching she employed interactive learning strategies and encouraged students to apply sociological insights in their everyday lives. Seeing students make connections between their individual lives and the larger social forces that influence them remains one of the most rewarding and exciting aspects of her teaching career.
Dr. BarBara M. Scott, widowed after 47 years of marriage, is the proud mother of two sons and proud grandmother of four grandchildren: three granddaughters and one grandson. As a wife and mother of two small children, she returned to school, earning a bachelor of arts degree in sociology and two different master’s degrees: a master of arts degree in sociology and a master of philosophy from Roosevelt University in Chicago and later a doctorate in sociology from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Dr. Scott is Professor Emerita of Sociology, African and African American Studies, and Women’s Studies at Northeastern Illinois University and was the university’s first coordinator of its African American Studies Program. She has served as president of the Association of Black Sociologists, a national organization, and she currently serves as its executive officer. Dr. Scott is also a former chair of the Sociology, Justice Studies, Social Work, and Women’s Studies departments at Northeastern Illinois University. She is a strong advocate for curriculum transformation and the integration of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation into the college curriculum as well as a social activist who has been in the forefront of organizing among national and international women of color, both within and outside academia.
Professor Scott has received meritorious recognition for her work and has served for more than 39 years as an educational and human resource consultant. She has coordinated the Women’s Studies Program and was a founding member of the university’s Black Women’s Caucus. Her research and teaching interests include marriages and families, particularly African American families; the structured relationships of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation; institutionalized racism and inequality; cultural images and the social construction of knowledge in the mass media; and Africana (aka Black) women’s studies. She finds teaching challenging and invigorating; among her favorite courses are Marriages and Families, Sociology of Black Women, Sociology of Racism, and Introductory Sociology. She is an enthusiastic advocate of applying sociology to the everyday worlds in which we live and routinely engages her students in field research in the communities in which they live and work. After years of teaching, she still gets excited about the varied insights that sociology offers into both the simplest and the most complex questions and issues of human social life.
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