2008 Woodie Awards
Video related to this article is available below.Issue date: 11/30/07 Section: Opinion
Your Voice | Letters
Opinion Board
Proud of our women professors
To the editor:
As Electrical and Systems Engineering Department chairman, I write to allay your worries about diversity in faculty hiring ("Defenseless Diversity" 11/19/2007).
We only hire faculty who have achieved preeminence in high impact areas of technology and engineering science and whose compelling intellectual vision sets the standard for research and teaching in their fields.
It is true, as you have noted, the color or gender of a single faculty member doesn't make that one person more valuable to the students.
But common sense (as wellas much scholarly study) establishes that more diverse communities are intellectually richer and offer collectively greater value than the brittle experiences of narrower settings.
Contrary to your worry that Penn and peer institutions have come to overemphasize gender or race in faculty recruitment, a growing body of science implicates persistent (unconscious) bias against women and minorities in academia - how else to explain the woeful statistics?
Far from marginalizing their accomplishments, accumulating evidence suggests that those women and minority faculty who make it to Penn embody the very apogee of talent, having prevailed against daunting and stubbornly persistent adversarial odds.
We brag about them because we know our hard-fought efforts to land these highly contested stars serves the best interests of the nation while enriching the teaching and learning community at Penn.
Daniel Koditschek
The author is the chair of the Electrical and Systems Engineering Department
Gutmann, accessible to students
To the editor:
Recently, Rina Thomas wrote an article arguing that President Gutmann is not accessible to the student body ("O Gutmann, where art thou?" 11/15/07). I was personally surprised to read her editorial, as I have always found the president to be open to interacting with students. In fact, she has been quite responsive to hearing feedback from the senior class and has always extended kindness to me in our interactions.
To the editor:
As Electrical and Systems Engineering Department chairman, I write to allay your worries about diversity in faculty hiring ("Defenseless Diversity" 11/19/2007).
We only hire faculty who have achieved preeminence in high impact areas of technology and engineering science and whose compelling intellectual vision sets the standard for research and teaching in their fields.
It is true, as you have noted, the color or gender of a single faculty member doesn't make that one person more valuable to the students.
But common sense (as wellas much scholarly study) establishes that more diverse communities are intellectually richer and offer collectively greater value than the brittle experiences of narrower settings.
Contrary to your worry that Penn and peer institutions have come to overemphasize gender or race in faculty recruitment, a growing body of science implicates persistent (unconscious) bias against women and minorities in academia - how else to explain the woeful statistics?
Far from marginalizing their accomplishments, accumulating evidence suggests that those women and minority faculty who make it to Penn embody the very apogee of talent, having prevailed against daunting and stubbornly persistent adversarial odds.
We brag about them because we know our hard-fought efforts to land these highly contested stars serves the best interests of the nation while enriching the teaching and learning community at Penn.
Daniel Koditschek
The author is the chair of the Electrical and Systems Engineering Department
Gutmann, accessible to students
To the editor:
Recently, Rina Thomas wrote an article arguing that President Gutmann is not accessible to the student body ("O Gutmann, where art thou?" 11/15/07). I was personally surprised to read her editorial, as I have always found the president to be open to interacting with students. In fact, she has been quite responsive to hearing feedback from the senior class and has always extended kindness to me in our interactions.
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