Melanie, You Will Be Missed…
February 20, 2017
Melanie Vainder accepting the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching
Professor Melanie Vainder, who passed away unexpectedly earlier this month, long represented the best Farmingdale State College has to offer: excellence in the classroom, outstanding scholarship, innovative thinking, and wholehearted devotion to students and colleagues.
To those in the Farmingdale family who didn’t know her, Melanie – who taught here for 37 years – was a Full Professor in the Departments of English/Humanities and Professional Communications. A licensed speech pathologist, in the classroom she may have been best known for speech courses she created and taught. She impressed so many people that in 1996 she received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. That was a complement to another award, the New York State English Council Teacher of Excellence.
Said Dr. Charles Adair, Acting Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences and Acting Chair of the Department of Professional Communications: “As a colleague of Melanie’s for many years I knew her as someone who was personally and professionally committed to the college and to the quality of its academic programs. More recently I became more fully aware of how totally dedicated she was to her students, how loyal she was to the Professional Communications program, and how fiercely she championed the junior faculty in the department. She has contributed greatly to this institution, and she will be greatly missed.”
Melanie was as active outside the classroom and she was in it. She took on numerous governance projects and was the driving force behind the campus assessment program that helped set standards and practices still in use. She was a member of the American Speech, Language and Hearing Association, and the American Association of Higher Education.
Maybe the best tribute to Melanie are these words by one of her students, found on the Rate My Professors web site: “Excellent professor and funny too. You have to work very hard but you will learn. She knows what she is doing.”
