GSU President Maimon named one of TIME magazine's "100 Most-Read Female Writers in College Classes"

What do Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, J.K. Rowling, and Governors State University President Elaine P. Maimon have in common? They have all been named one of the 100 Most-Read Female Writers in College Classes by Time.

President Maimon appears on the list at number 63, tucked between Louisa May Alcott and Maya Angelou. Her book, The McGraw-Hill Handbook, is a worldwide English department standard.

President Maimon described her reaction to the achievement as feeling “astonished, honored … thrilled to be on a list—any list—with (her favorite writer of all time) Jane Austen.”

“When I had time to give the article a little more thought,” she said, “I was pleased that my text on English composition was available to so many students in the English-speaking world. I’m a teacher at heart, and my textbooks allow me to be in many, many classrooms, even when my duties as president make it impossible to be in a single classroom for an entire semester. My top professional goal is to help as many students as possible to become independent writers and thinkers.”

The list is based on data collected from over 1.1 million syllabi by the Open Syllabus Project (OSP), a collaborative project with members from Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia University among others. According to David McClure, a lead developer of the OSP, approximately 70% of the syllabi sampled come from U.S. universities. The others are culled from Australia, Canada, and the U.K. The project is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a New York-based not-for-profit philanthropic organization.