Back in session

When curating the list of local faculty members to profile in this year's back-to-school issue, we decided to have a little fun. We logged onto ratemyprofessors.com and slogged through the site's reviews of professors and instructors, looking for the infamous red chili pepper symbol. That's the icon students give to the educators they find attractive in one way or another. And to narrow the field, we settled on contacting only those with the fully engulfed pepper—the one signaling the “hottest” among the hot.

It's hard to take seriously a website that hosts anonymous comments and rates faculty on a scale of 1 to 5 in such categories as helpfulness, clarity and easiness—whatever that means. So we didn't. Our goal was to come up with a varied mix of personalities and interests, and that's exactly what happened. We reached out to a wide cross-section of both local campus communities and found an engaging handful of educators who were gracious enough to chat about their work, lives and, in some cases, that little chili pepper icon.

This special issue also includes a few other back-to-school-themed items, so look for the logo pictured to the left while flipping through these pages. We hope the school year is a productive and successful one for the entire community—students and teachers alike.