Well-known Psychology prof unique in the classroom

Sometimes, pictures just don't do it -- you need the real, mushy gray thing.

Psychology professor Paul Rozin brought a human brain to his first class of the year. A man who does few things by halves, stories about him are told with relish and awe. His dog has the run of the room during his lectures. He adopted his daughter from Vietnam as a sixteen year old who spoke no English.

A Penn staple for 40 years and counting, the brain-toting and well-respected Rozin still works for the same institution that hired him straight out of Harvard's post-doctoral fellowship program.

Arriving at Penn was Rozin's first encounter with Philadelphia -- a city he claims to have loved from the start -- and with the profession he regards as his calling.

"I always knew that I wanted to be a professor -- I just didn't know of what!" laughs the psychologist and one-time would-be physicist.

While momentum and Newton's Laws may not be the stuff his classes are made of, Rozin is no stranger to being a force in the University. The former chair of the Psychology Department and former head of the Benjamin Franklin Scholars program has worked to expand course offerings and recruit new professors.

Rozin explains that of all of the positions he has held, heading the BFS honors program holds a special place in his heart because it gave him these opportunities. He worked to create new, cutting edge classes for the program and many of these have become mainstream classes in the College.

One of Rozin's triumphs eventually resulted in a class specially designed for renowned author Chaim Potok.

Persistently, Rozin pursued Potok to teach a class. And when they finally met to negotiate, Rozin told Potok to teach a class in anything -- whatever he wanted.

Confused, Potok asked Rozin what he meant.

"What are you working on right now?" Rozin asked.

Potok answered that he was working on a biography of a Russian Jew.

"That could be the class!" Rozin remembers exclaiming. "How to construct a biography."

But Potok was still a little unsure, saying that the texts that he was using for the biography spanned a number of languages.

"I can have someone fluent in each language in your course," Rozin asserted, and Potok was sold.

The class turned out to be a tremendous success, and Rozin even convinced the University to pay to have the subject of Potok's work flown up from Israel to meet with the students during their last class.

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Rozin got an early start in academia and was headed for college before he learned to drive. After a successful batch of standardized tests, Rozin was recruited by the University of Chicago just after his sophomore year of high school.

It was at Chicago, under the leadership of Robert Hutchins, that Rozin began developing many of his theories on education and teaching methods.

Hutchins "believed in ideas and not memorizing facts," Rozin says, explaining he holds this principle dear in his own classroom.

"I want to communicate to people that the point is the ideas and not the facts," Rozin says of his tests, which place little to no emphasis on regurgitating details from the text. "The concepts are more likely to be remembered," he explains.

In the spirit of such a theory, Rozin embraced the exam policy at the University of Chicago.

"You could... take final tests over again the next year if you weren't happy with your score," Rozin recalls.

While Rozin stands by this testing method in theory, Penn policy prohibits him from putting it into practice here.

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College junior Anne Sackler is a second generation Paul Rozin student. Her mother took his Introduction to Psychology class decades ago, and Anne even managed to use her mother's notes for the class over 30 years later.

"Paul Rozin's lectures were 'standing room only' performances filled with intellect, wit and an uncanny knack for keeping us interested in the most arcane minutia of experimental psychology," Beth Sackler enthuses decades later. "As an advisor, he encouraged his students to participate actively in research, shepherding them along the way, and submitting their work to professional journals."

And Beth says she reaped the benefits of Rozin's fatherly advising.

"My first publication was as a Penn undergraduate, thanks to the encouragement and dedication of this extraordinary man," she says.

Beth went on to become a clinical psychologist and the mother of another Rozin enthusiast.

"Professor Rozin makes each class a unique experience," Anne says. "He never lets his students fall between the cracks, simply because he believes that the performance of his students is a direct reflection of his teaching abilities."

Pushing his students as hard as he pushes himself, "he is never satisfied with 'good enough' and he inspires us all to be better students," she adds.

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On the whole, Rozin's classroom experiences have been as unique as his teaching style.

Once, while teaching a guest lecture at an Indian university, he was desperately trying to rouse his somnolent students. After asking for opinions and thoughts proved hopeless, Rozin was somewhat stumped.

"Finally I said 'the class is over -- you can go now,' and nobody left," he laughs.

On a separate, markedly less pleasant occasion, the usually well-loved professor was faced with a death threat. The suspected perpetrator? -- one of his own students.

Undaunted, Rozin taught the class anyway -- with a bodyguard just outside.

Nowadays, Rozin spends little time with passive or unhappy students. Devoting time to research, he advises both undergraduates and graduates in their studies, while working concurrently on his own material.

His major research field currently centers on food -- what people think of it and how they enjoy it -- spanning different countries and cultures.

Rozin embraces the topic as a discipline that can include sociology, anthropology, political science, biology and medicine all at the same time.

As the force behind many successful new classes in the past, Rozin has a syllabus for a food-oriented class in the works.

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Bursting into class with his beloved dog Pandy nipping at his heals, making jokes in a fake Yiddish accent and just generally being himself, Rozin has enamored generations of students. And he has a good time doing it too.

In the words of Rozin, "I cannot imagine a better job."

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