WFF 2023 Wasserman Award goes to Prof. Sybil Alexandrov

WFF is proud to present the 2023 Elga R. Wasserman Courage, Clarity, and Leadership Award award to Prof. Sybil Alexandrov. Alexandrov has been a crusader whose intersectional activism as a teacher and university citizen has led her to work for faculty equity focused on problems faced by instructional faculty at Yale – a largely feminized workforce - around benefits, renewal, department and university-wide support, job security, salaries, and lack of respect from tenured faculty.  In response to her activism around equity and inclusion, Yale has responded with some structural changes including making full-time instructional faculty eligible for parental leave.  Alexandrov began teaching at Yale as a Lector in 1997 and was promoted to Senior Lector II in 2015.  She was awarded the Richard H. Brodhead Prize for Teaching Excellence by Non-Ladder Faculty in 2011, and one student recently urged his peers to “take this class, even if you’re not interested in Spanish just for the pleasure of having Alexandrov as a teacher.”  She has forced her colleagues to think about the university as a whole in a context of instructional faculty with some 30-35 different ranks and no standard salary.  With confidence, courage and clarity, she has openly pointed to inequities and sought their solution.  She noted recently in the Yale Daily News that people forget that instructional faculty often teach the courses that lay the foundation for ladder faculty’s classes and “if there’s not a strong foundation, things crumble.”