Pro Bene Meritis

The Pro Bene Meritis award is the highest honor bestowed by the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. The purpose of the award is to honor individuals who are committed to the liberal arts, who have made outstanding contributions in professional or philanthropic pursuits, or who have participated in service related to the College of Liberal Arts. In addition to expressing appreciation to those distinguished individuals so honored, the College of Liberal Arts, through this award, is seeking to heighten public awareness of the critical role played by the liberal arts in education and society today.
The award is presented annually at a dinner in the fall. The alumni, faculty, students and staff of the college take pride in these individuals and the legacy of their character and achievements.

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Pro Bene Meritis Award

The award is presented annually at a dinner in the fall. The alumni, faculty, students and staff of the college take pride in these individuals and the legacy of their character and achievements.

2024 Pro Bene Meritis Recipients

Robert H. Abzug, Ph.D.

Dr. Robert Abzug is the Audre and Bernard Rapoport Regents Chair of Jewish Studies Emeritus and is a professor of history and American studies emeritus. He earned a B.A., magna cum laude, from Harvard University, a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and taught at UCLA before coming to Texas in 1978.

Dr. Abzug’s commitment to the university’s educational mission was showcased though his leadership in two major initiatives, along with this teaching and scholarship. From 1996 to 2002, he served as the founding director of Liberal Arts Honors, a comprehensive program that offers liberal arts students an enriched core curriculum and opportunities for interdisciplinary research and writing across the college. From 2007 to 2017, he was the founding director of the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies. Through its public programming and undergraduate major, the center has broadened the university’s academic study of world religions and the role of Jews in the development of Western and Middle Eastern cultures.

Dr. Abzug taught undergraduate and graduate courses on American history and culture, the history of the Holocaust, and the intersection between psychology and religion in American culture. His commitment to students has been recognized by several teaching awards, including the Friar Society Centennial Teaching Fellowship, the Jean Holloway Award, the Silver Spurs Teaching Fellowship, and the Liberal Arts Council’s Professor of the Year. He also directed numerous undergraduate honors theses and over 20 doctoral dissertations.

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Barry Dauber

Barry Dauber is the vice president of GenAI GTM TM at Databricks. A native of Vienna, Virginia, he earned his B.A. in economics and government from The University of Texas at Austin. As a student, he was president of the Liberal Arts Council and held senior positions in other on-campus organizations.

Dauber began his career in Washington, D.C., where he worked in management consulting at Deloitte. After moving to San Francisco, he built a career as a startup sales and business development leader in the search, machine learning/GenAI, and analytics space. He came to Databricks after leading sales at MosaicML, a startup focused on machine learning training efficiency, which Databricks acquired in July 2023 for $1.3 billion.

Dauber has extensive experience leading teams, developing product-market fit, establishing sales processes, and working with some of the world’s largest corporations, governments, and intelligence agencies.

A Texas Exes life member, Dauber is passionate about UT and the liberal arts education it provided him. He continues to serve on the College of Liberal Arts Advisory Council and the Department of Economics Advisory Board. Dauber lives in New York City with his wife, Stacy, their daughter Elle, and their cat, Elsie.

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