Preview Mode Links will not work in preview mode

Tribute to Charles Brewer

Mar 10, 2018

For a generation of psychology faculty, the name of Charles Brewer has been synonymous with the teaching of psychology. After completing work for the Ph.D. at the University of Arkansas, Charles taught briefly at Elmira College and The College of Wooster, before joining the faculty of Furman University in 1967. He has been at Furman ever since, and is now Professor Emeritus there. Charles hit the ground running as a teacher, receiving the first Furman Meritorious Teaching Award in 1969, and a few years later becoming president of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology.
 
Charles became a pre-eminent authority on the life and work of John Broadus Watson (an 1899 graduate of Furman), and his 12-year term as editor of the Teaching of Psychology journal established him as both mentor and demanding critic for his colleagues in their writing efforts. He loved to demand “felicity of expression,” and teachers whose writing was subject to Charles’s editing sometimes said their work had been “Brewerized.”
 
Charles’s contributions to teaching have received recognition in various ways, including establishment of the American Psychological Foundation Charles L. Brewer Distinguished Teaching Award, and dedication of the Charles & Marjorie Brewer Reading Room at the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron. Among his favorite accomplishments over the years, Charles has often mentioned his role as one of the charter faculty consultants for the Advanced Placement Psychology Program, and his selection as an all-state basketball player during his high school days in Arkansas.
 
We owe our thanks to Eric Landrum and Garth Neufeld for their efforts to produce this interview and for recording Charles’s thoughts in his own words.
 
Ken Keith
STP Past-President
March 2018