Your Voice | Letters

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.

While I can only speak with respect to my own experiences, I am concerned to hear that Rina, along with the students she interviewed, feels differently. For example, Rina argues that the both existing social channels and formal channels for accessing the president are simply not good enough. However, she does not identify actual unmet issues that students want addressed, nor does she articulate why students with those issues could not bring them up at a University Council meeting.

Perhaps it would be most productive to test Rina's thesis by identifying specific occurrences of inaccessibility and a list of unaddressed student concerns. After all, the author was recently able to reach the president's office by phone to conduct the interview mentioned in the editorial and also in person through a University Council meeting.

I would love to continue this dialogue with Rina, or anyone else who feels that the Penn administration is inaccessible. A big part of my job as a student leader is to make sure that students' needs are being addressed, and if you don't feel they are, I would love to help you.

Puneet Singh The author is a Wharton senior and president of the senior class

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