About the Award
Among the many honors bestowed by institutions of higher education, the Teachers College Medal for Distinguished Service carries special significance. Each year, the College awards the Medal to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to education and human development. Recipients of the TC Medal for Distinguished Service are honored at the May convocation ceremonies, where they also serve as graduation speakers.
Since its founding in 1887 to help immigrant children and their families, the College has been a powerful force for social justice, championing education that opens doors, unlocks human potential and debates our society’s most inconvenient truths. The College was the birthplace of the community school; of urban education studies and supplementary education; of special education and the inclusive education movement. TC prepared black teachers from the South at a time when institutions in Southern states would not accept them. Through the years our faculty have re-envisioned education to speak to the changing demographics of each new generation. Today, through a network of public schools we support in Harlem, we are leaders in modeling university-public school partnership.
Teachers College awards the Medal of Distinguished Service to those whose lives and work have immeasurably advanced social justice. TC Medalists have included:
- the human rights activists Coretta Scott King, Desmond Tutu, Marian Wright Edelman, Morris Dees, and the Brown family of Topeka, Kansas;
- the political leaders John Lewis, Shirley Chisholm and Donna Shalala;
- the journalists Bob Herbert, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, and Jonathan Kozol;
- the psychologists Kenneth Clark, Carl Rogers, James Comer, Edmund Gordon, Bruno Bettelheim and Jerome Bruner;
- the education scholars Paulo Friere, Henry Louis Gates, David Levering Lewis, Margaret Mead, Claude Steele, Luis Moll, Gloria Ladsen Billings, Ted Sizer, Linda Darling Hammond and Maxine Greene;
- and, from the arts, Maya Angelou, Pete Seeger, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Spike Lee and Judy Collins.
Awarded each year at the College’s convocation ceremonies, the Teachers College Medal provides its recipients with a unique public platform from which to comment on issues of the day. Our medalists deliver memorable addresses that are archived on the College’s website and often reported on by national and local media.