Helen M. Cavanagh, who taught American History at Illinois State from 1946 until her retirement in 1971, endowed several scholarships and awards for master's students. The Cavanagh Award, approximately $2000, is given in the spring to one or more master's students. To be eligible, a student must have a 3.75 GPA and have taken between 12 and 24 graduate hours and not have been nominated before.
These awards, for amounts that vary according to the fund's earnings, are granted in the fall to the master's students who have written in the faculty's judgment the best thesis in American and World history, respectively. The criteria for granting the award are clarity of purpose and methodology; range and depth of sources; organization and analysis; literary style; and contribution to the discipline, either as original scholarship or synthesis. In recent years these have averaged $2,500 each.
