Fares Center Director, Professor Nadim Rouhana Wins Paddock Teaching Award & Speaks at Commencement

On May 19, 2024, the Director of the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies, Professor Nadim Rouhana, received the James L. Paddock Teaching Award at The Fletcher School’s Class of 2024 commencement ceremony. Student Council Member and Class of 2024 graduate Courtney Foster introduced Professor Rouhana and announced the award. The Fares Center congratulates Professor Rouhana for this important recognition of his high-quality teaching and academic contributions to the Fletcher community.

The Paddock award’s nomination process was open to the entire Fletcher student body, and Professor Rouhana was selected by the Fletcher Student Council after over 15 students wrote nominations for him. Some of the students’ nominations included comments such as:

• Professor Rouhana has shown up for his students in this most challenging year with incredible compassion, patience, and endless energy in spite of immense personal pain.
• He has created an environment of critical learning, from a place of trust and safety, when it didn’t feel possible amid so much trauma and discomfort. 
• He is incredibly knowledgeable and accomplished, but he listens first. He presents a wide variety of thorough and nuanced perspectives on topics, but he allows the student to formulate their own stance. He treats students as equals, allowing himself to learn from us as much as we are from. He makes no student feel like an outsider on any topics.
• Professor Rouhana is single-handedly the best part of my Fletcher experience.
• Professor Rouhana has taught me so much about compassion, conflict resolution, research methods, and the type of mentor I want to be in the future.

With the Paddock Award comes the role of faculty speaker at commencement. Professor Rouhana discussed his approach to teaching, which he described as tightly related to “what I teach, my related life experience, and my practice.” He expounded on these three elements by describing, respectively, his courses on conflict and conflict resolution theory, his experiences as a Palestinian citizen of Israel and professor in Israeli, Palestinian, and U.S. universities, and his work on problem-solving workshops between Israelis and Palestinians. In his teaching, these three elements guide him to create an inclusive class climate that includes all points of view and embraces discomfort and challenging ideas. Finally, he described the Fletcher School’s approach to dealing with the “fraught, devastating, and painful historic moment” of this year, circling back to his belief in a teaching philosophy that “center[s] respect, free and open intellectual inquiry, and an inclusive and accepting climate for all students.”

Professor Rouhana ended with a personal note: “Speaking completely of my own personal view,” he stated, “the students… can be a force that pushes international law and diplomacy back to its rightful place as tools of conflict resolution that should be applied to all nations regardless of their power or status,” and encouraged the graduates to “push the world’s political systems and our mainstream institutions to be more inclusive, responsible, compassionate, representative, and fair.” Professor Rouhana’s full speech can be viewed by clicking here.

About the Paddock Award: In the spring of 1992, Dr. James L. Paddock, Professor of International Business Relations, passed away. An award was established in his name to be given annually to a Fletcher professor who best exemplifies excellence in teaching. The Paddock Award was given away for the first time at Commencement in 1993. Professor Paddock was known for his passion for teaching, enthusiasm for the subjects he taught, and compassion towards his students. His particular gift was an ability to make complex material understandable and enjoyable. Despite his active involvement in Fletcher and in the international business field, Professor Paddock made it a point to be accessible to students and open to their concerns. Just as he was an insightful teacher, he was a caring and effective advisor. This award is intended for the Fletcher professor who best exhibits these characteristics.