@albert69 Sure you can be creative with dolls. I believe that is indeed the point of dolls. But there is a lot of subtle nudging that goes on so that many women feel more at home in other fields – or, if they’re in engineering at all, the “soft-science” based ones like biomedical or chemical. I have data from my university; bioeng is almost 1/3 female, from what I recall, while other disciplines have much lower rates (CompE: 5%). There is a clear disconnect there. Is it just that girls are naturally uninterested in computers? (Hardly.) That people have told them they shouldn’t go into CompE? (As everyone keeps saying, no, we’re not quite that mindlessly obedient.) Or is that they, from childhood, have not been exposed to types of engineering in a way that would make CompE seem like a viable option for them? FIVE PERCENT.
I had an algebra 2 teacher who was very subtly discouraging. So much so, actually, that I came out of that class thinking not “Mrs. So and So doesn’t like me,” but “I must not be good at math.” All of the “math people” I have ever met – the ones who get recognized as the smartest ones in class, the ones teachers dote on – have been male. Yet I have proven to myself time and time again that I am not bad at math. A’s in four college math courses, three of which were honors, and I had a 4.00 until last semester. Still I couch my answers in fluff and say no, I’m not smart, I just work hard…those kinds of childhood discouragements are hard to unlearn.
@QuantMech - honest question for you. How many times have you ever seen a Dean or a department chair call out a fellow faculty member (not to mention a student) in an edited, published article in a manner where it is completely obvious to everyone in the department who is being referred to?
To me, this is beyond the pale. Publications are an academic’s stock in trade. Academics often spend hours polishing their prose, submitting multiple revised drafts, and making sure they don’t slight anyone in their citations. In the business world, this would be like a CEO making a vice president sit at a table by themselves during a public shareholder’s meeting … it’s childish, public humiliation, and it was clearly done deliberately.
A Dean has to be able lead their fellow tenured faculty members, and these faculty may very well need to work together for their entire careers. If another comparable incident occurred then I wouldn’t be surprised if the law faculty sustained a vote of no-confidence in the Dean.
The faculty member in question and the student have every right to expect a formal, public apology from the Dean.
Honestly, the issue isn’t whether or not the word “vivacious” has a sexist connotation (it probably does have a bit of one).
The real issue for UF is whether or not Dean Rosenbury has the required professional maturity for the job.
“We can debate what makes women avoid engineering all day, but I think it goes back to what they’ve been exposed to, what they’ve been encouraged to do. We give them dolls instead of Legos. We tell them math is hard and let them say they’ll never be any good at it. We don’t show them that engineering isn’t a boys’ club.”
Funny you say that about the dolls. My parent banned dolls in our household, but Legos and more masculine toys were plentiful, for me and my sister. If we brought a doll home, it would quickly disappear, sometimes right out of our little hands. They had me doing so many math drills, that in 6th grade, the math teacher had no more assignments for me, and gave me a yardstick to go out and measure the playground. I think they can do better nowadays!
My dad always brags about my mom being a trailblazer at Boeing, for being the first female engineer to refuse to wear a dress. Feminist? No, my mom says, “Fat legs”.
Craig Boise: Cleveland State University
Michael Cahill: Brooklyn Law School
Laura Rosenbury: Washington University Law School
Jennifer Bard: Texas Tech University School of Law
Mark Alexander: Seton Hall University School of Law
Charles Tabb: University of Illinois School of Law
George Kuney: University of Tennessee College of Law
Phillip Closius: University of Baltimore School of Law
Darryll Jones: Florida A&M University College of Law
Daniel Crane: University of Michigan Law School
Note, that none were current UF law school faculty. UF administration was NOT happy with the law schools performance.
This issue around the word “vivacious” is a sideshow. She needs to improve her relationship with the alumni (which this did NOT do), and improve UF’s rankings. Two or three years ago FSU leaped ahead of UF, only to have UF pass them again, the following year. That doesn’t sit well with Gator Nation or the administration.
IMHO, if the UF Law school doesn’t show improvement over the next 2 or 3 years (tops), UF will be looking for a new Dean. She knows this, and I expect her to attempt a charm offensive over the next few weeks, since a lack of alumni support will drastically shorten the amount of time she has to turn the program around.
Gator88NE, #304, when a person reaches the point of being a semi-finalist in an administrative search at a public university, the person knows that his/her name is very likely to be announced publicly. The list doesn’t tell you how many other candidates didn’t make the cut to the semi-final list. If the UF administration is not happy with the law school’s performance, that is more reason for the current faculty to be excluded from serious consideration, and for them to be unhappy with any Dean brought in to “improve the place.”
al2simon, #302, you make a good point, but I don’t have experience with publishing in law reviews. I have heard of scientific work being referred to in print as “mistaken, wrong-headed, and confused.” I can’t provide the citation, though. That is different from referring to personal interactions, of course.
Someone in the legal field would need to comment on the standard practices in law-review publications. The editor did not remove it from the article. On the other hand, the editor was a law-school student.
Why not just do what grown-ups do? If something was likely not meant to cause offense but did so anyway, you talk to the offender privately and express your rationale and intention that it will not happen again. This passive-aggressive call-it-out-in-a-journal is the wimp’s way out. Color me unimpressed.
I thought the Dean did meet directly with the student and the advisor to the law review shortly after the introduction. Was that impression incorrect?
Another point I don’t know about publishing in law reviews: How long does it take from initial submission of a manuscript for the article to appear in print? This varies pretty wildly from field to field, and from journal to journal, in STEM disciplines. Perhaps the Dean wrote the comment while she was still quite annoyed, and it appeared months later.
Also, when people are identifiable in a law review article (and it’s not a case of a convicted person, where there is a written record), are they not given a heads-up by the editor, and offered a chance to respond before the article goes into print? That would seem like prudent practice to me. Perhaps the personal reference in the article is another result of having the law review edited by law-school students.
She claims that particular part of the law review article was mean to address “implicit gender bias” something she personally refers to as “unconscious gender bias.” She says it was not meant to imply she thought the comment was “sexist.” And as of 3 days ago she has apologized for the confusion:
Glad she apologized. She should have. Next time she may think a tad harder about how to illustrate a circumstance with clarity without stabbing someone in the back. Lesson learned hopefully for the “teacher.” Interesting how so many of the comments to the articles written about this express similar thoughts to what many of us have. I have to admit, I finally googled her and sure as shooting…in every image she looks well…vivacious…oops I mean energetic.
If it were me, I would view such an “apology” as quite insufficient.
She could have easily made her point by writing “a male law student introduced me by saying …” and “a senior faculty member said …”. Instead, she went out of her way to identify the student as the student who was the “(male) president of the law review” in the fall of 2015 and the faculty member as “the law review faculty advisor” at the time.
It’s BS for her to pretend that she didn’t mean to call out and publicly chastise these particular people in print.
@QuantumMech - Like you said, there is a big difference between academic disagreement and a Dean publicizing a disagreeable personal interaction with a student and a professor. Further, as I’m sure you know, referring to someone’s work as “mistaken, wrong-headed, and confused” in print either means that i) you are friends and can get away with teasing each other, or ii) you are trying to embarrass someone or to provoke a professional feud.
I haven’t seen colleagues in the same department feud with each other in print, and I certainly haven’t seen a newly arrived Dean do that to a faculty member within their own school.
I can't imagine you'd disagree that for a professor to do that to one of her students in print is completely unacceptable.
At first I thought this was much ado about nothing. But after reading the paragraph from the article and thinking about it, I’m now of the opinion that the Dean’s conduct was very unprofessional.
Is she deliberately trying to start a war with a faculty member and to polarize the faculty and alumni of the law school? If she isn’t, then she needs to offer a much better formal public apology for her conduct, post haste.
If the law student has any plans to practice law, he needs to develop a thicker skin, pronto.
This is especially true if he plans to be a litigator. In litigation, every single day involves someone “calling you out” for some perceived offense. It’s part of the job. In fact, in litigation, there is someone on the other side whose job it is to identify any tiny perceived error made by the opposing side and blow it all up out of proportion in public filings.
He needs to get used to be publicly criticized. There’s no room in the profession for thin-skinned people who can’t deal with having their actions intensely scrutinized.
@bodangles I see where you’re coming from on the teachers, and yes, that is a problem. My mom had the exact opposite thing happen to her though - she loved her algebra teacher in high school, which made her want to do the advanced math track just so she could take classes with this one particular teacher. That led to her becoming exceptionally good at math, which led to her career as an electrical engineer.
Sorry if I’m side tracking the thread. I’m going to be writing a research paper on women in STEM (or lack thereof) this semester for my women’s studies class. I was just interested in that side conversation to see what some perspectives on it are.
And in some biglaw firms my friends and I worked in, the above is only a mild taste of what biglaw associates and staff could be subjected to.
One litigation paralegal colleague in a friend’s firm ended up getting hit with a heavy lawbook tossed by one of the most senior equity partners with that firm simply because he brought bad news on a case he was overseeing. Ended up settling in the six figures to keep things quiet and the senior equity partner effectively given a slap on the wrist by being sent to a few anger management classes by his peer equity partners.
I’ve personally witnessed a few equity partners and senior of counsel/senior associates scream at associates or staff for minor mistakes and/or because they were “having a bad day”.
I’ve seen judges scream at attorneys during court sessions for everything ranging from making arguments the judge felt was “absurd”, missing deadlines/chronic requests for deadline extensions, or filing motions as a stalling tactic.,despite the denials of the filing attorney.
I was thinking more along the lines of someone on the other side claiming that you had mischaracterized some case you cited in a brief or claiming that you had withheld some relevant document that the low-level document-reviewers had simply overlooked. Wasn’t suggesting that the new lawyer should expect to have books thrown at his head.
I think it just illustrates all the petty microgressions that are occurring on college campuses. Perhaps alittle too much pseudoscience going on in academia?
When two people make different mistakes, that doesn’t mean that they cancel out and nobody made a mistake. That’s something you learn in kindergarten, not law school.
