Sue Warrick Doederlein

On September 8, 1969, Arthur and Sue Doederlein joined the faculty at Northern Illinois University. It was their seventh anniversary and the beginning of a new love – a true passion for NIU and its extraordinary students.Arthur served for more than thirty years as the Undergraduate Studies Director in the Department of Communication. In that capacity, he advised thousands of students, spending countless hours helping students plan their academic programs and counseling them about graduate and professional schools and career opportunities. One of his earliest positions at Northern was professor in the CHANCE program; his involvement with that ethnically diverse and very special population remained a center of his professional life. He also taught in the Honors Program and directed many Honors capstone projects.Sue was a professor of English who went on to become Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, a role she enjoyed for more than thirty years. Her most demanding and important teaching assignments were in the CHANCE and Honors programs. Both Arthur and Sue received the Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award, a recognition that they each prized. Arthur had received a similar award as a faculty member at Northwestern. He said it took him longer to earn the award at Northern because Northern students were a tougher crowd. Both Arthur and Sue were members of Phi Kappa Phi, and Sue was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.In honor of the generous support they received from their parents as well as the support they received for their graduate studies from the Danforth Foundation and the NDEA, Arthur and Sue frequently discussed establishing a scholarship at Northern to encourage the completion of a degree in the humanities in the college they each served for more than forty years. The scholarship will alternate between the CHANCE program, which serves many students whose backgrounds resemble the working class roots of Arthur and Sue and the Honors program, which provides academic enrichment of the sort they both received at DePauw University in the liberal arts and sciences. Arthur and Sue were able to go from their working class backgrounds in Toledo, Ohio, to achieve academic success at outstanding universities because of they very solid education they attained at Toledo, DeVilbiss High School, the place where they fell in love. Through this scholarship, they celebrate those disciplines that centered their lives.