The Sandor Teszler Award for Moral Courage
and Service to Humankind represents the highest ideals that the Wofford community espouses, and it carries with it an honorary degree, a citation and a $10,000 cash award, made possible by Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix Corp.
Sandor Teszler was born in the old Austro-Hungarian empire, where he was ostracized from childhood not so much because he was a Jew, but because he was afflicted with club feet that required many painful operations. He is said to have loved music, especially opera, from an early age. Later in life, he befriended his fellow exile, composer Béla Bartók.
During World War II, a successful businessman in textiles, Teszler and his family – his wife and two sons – were taken to a death house on the Danube, where victims were systematically beaten to death. They were prepared to die, prepared to take a poison capsule that would allow them to escape further torture, but they were saved when one of their tormentors inexplicably advised them not to take the pills, saying "Help is on the way." Shortly thereafter they were rescued by an official from the Swiss Embassy.
Coming to the Carolinas, Teszler again joined the textile industry, and was one of the first to desegregate his mills.
In the last decade of his life, Teszler graced the Wofford campus, "attending so many classes that the faculty, acknowledging a wisdom and experience greater than their own, honored themselves by making him an adjunct professor," Wofford President Benjamin B. Dunlap wrote in a tribute to Teszler that appeared in The Charlotte Observer in August 2000. (Read the full article)
To Wofford students, Tezler was known simply as "Opi," Hungarian for grandfather. The college library bears his name.
Medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer, founding director of the international charity organization Partners In Health, received the award March 27, 2007. View video highlights from Farmer's visit.
Children's Defense Fund founder and president Marian Wright Edelman was the first recipient of the Sandor Teszler Award for Moral Courage and Service to Humankind, given April 20, 2006.