Robert Watson

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It Robert Watson’s success as a teacher was to be measure by numbers alone, he would already distinguish himself as one of UCLA’s most beloved professors. In his 13 year with the UCLA English department, his mean instructor and course ratings have seldom dropped below eight on UCLA’s nine-point scale. In recent years, his median scores have held steady at nine.

But numbers tell only a small part of the story. Watson’s immeasurable contributions to academia and to the individual lives of his students can only be fully appreciated by listening to this students’ testimonials through the years. “Here, for the first time, I heard my own voice in a classroom,” a student wrote in a course evaluation. Students have echoed this sentiment, praising his amazing ability to enhance their understanding of the material and relate to them on a personal level. One participant in a popular graduate student seminar describes “one of his most endearing qualities” as “a combination of intellectual rigor and refined sensibilities on the one hand and playful, and lowbrow cultural reference on the other.”

He manages to bring the outside world into the classroom, but he also brings his work at UCLA back outside. He has been deeply involved in several outreach arrangements with underprivileged high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, one of which involved Watson linking students in his upper division Shakespeare class to students in Bell High School for a mentoring program. His work to connect university with K-12 teaching reflects his commitment to positive social change, dramatizing the larger sense of life and social responsibility that so many of his students notice, admire and hope to emulate.