Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts -

You may have read the very provocative article in The Wall Street Journal entitled, Gender Bias Alleged at UCLA's Anderson Business School.  The article included the graphic below which highlights dramatically the paucity of tenured and tenure-track female faculty at business schools.

As the first female Full Professor at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst and the first female holder of an endowed chaired professorship in the UMass system, the statistics and comments in the article really pained me and, yet, I fully understood the situation. Just read the following from the article: Prof. Rossi, who has been at the school since 1997, said she hasn't observed overt discrimination or hostility at Anderson, but said she has witnessed subtle digs and dismissive comments directed at women from colleagues and students. "It's death by a thousand paper cuts," she said.  Professor Aimee Drolet Rossi is a marketing professor and a member of the Gender Equity Task Force, created by Dr. Olian, the first female Dean of UCLA's Anderson School of Management. 

Everyone, males and females alike, needs to be treated professionally, in a civil manner, and have their contributions valued and recognized. 

Our colleges and universities are microcosms of our modern society. Lessons learned in academia carry through in one's life and impact behavior in government, the corporate world, our neighborhoods, and our families.

Academia is a testbed for our social and professional networks and for analyzing the behavior of decision-makers in hierarchies from students to faculty and staff to administrators, from department chairs to the upper echelons of  deans, provosts, chancellors, and presidents. Along the way, civility has been lost and the ivory tower now stands upon a muddy foundation. Positive, inclusive leadership has to come from the top.

There once was a time when collegiality mattered and a colleague's success would be celebrated through public recognition or a kind, personal note (remember those?). I even received, on several occasions, a bouquet of flowers, delivered with chocolate chip cookies for my daughter, sent, compliments of a top administrator.

Those not acknowledged appropriately and feeling excluded – I have listened to many from Assistant Professors to Full Professors  – actually feel pain. I have personally felt victimized - sometimes the "brand" is only what matters rather than individuals and research.

An organization such as a college or university is built on the achievements of all, accumulated over many, many years, as is its reputation and history. Good manners matter and provide the lubricant for the flourishing of work and productivity.  Good manners should be part and parcel of the academic culture. Why is it, then,  so hard for some in academia, which has been referred to as the “loneliest profession,”  to acknowledge with a thank you (even emailing a “Thnx” seems to be challenging for some),  to be consistent in recognizing contributions of individuals, to be inclusive communicators  and conduits for information, and to be respectful of others?


Civil society is built on courtesy, respect, and empathy.

It's time to bring back good manners to academia. Females, and even males, should not be dying by a thousand paper cuts!

Tips on Organizing a Successful Speaker Series

As the Spring 2010 semester is drawing to a close, I thought that it would be helpful and worthwhile to offer some tips on organizing a Speaker Series. I have been the Faculty Advisor to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter since the Fall of 2004, since I decided not to leave UMass Amherst, despite a marvelous offer. I decided to stay, partially, due to the students that I had at that time, the challenges and opportunities that I still wanted to avail myself of in New England and the northeast, and the fact that Massachusetts is an intellectual mecca in the US. When I accepted the counteroffer that UMass gave, I also felt that I should seriously look around and see how I could enhance the educational mission at the Isenberg School.

I decided that what was missing and what could both enliven and enhance the visibility and reputation of the programs that I was associated with, from our undergraduate Operations Management program to the doctoral program in Management Science, was a Speaker Series. This initiative became part of the activities of the UMass Amherst INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Student Chapter, which was reestablished in the Fall of 2004 after a very long period of dormancy.

To-date, our Speaker Series has hosted twelve semesters of speakers. The talks are open to the public and attract an audience from throughout the UMass Amherst campus and beyond. Each semester's full roster of talks is posted weeks in advance and advertised heavily. The chapter officers disseminate announcements on campus, and send out two messages announcing each speaker through two different e-lists. The invitations to potential speakers are sent out months in advance and, typically, come from me, and are copied to the cognizant chapter officer. I also work with a chapter officer who helps in the logistics of making the travel arrangements for each speaker in order to make for a fluid and comfortable visit.

The students follow up with official thank you letters, copies of which (we check this out with the speaker) also go to the speaker's supervisors (letters have even been sent to the President of MIT from our chapter).

These seminars take place on scheduled Fridays at 11AM in the Isenberg School of Management, with lunch following. This kind of schedule has worked very well for us and our speakers and creates a relaxing environment in which to discuss the topics presented. We have had the privilege of having experts speak on transportation problems, humanitarian logistics, food safety, the smart grid, on healthcare, on supply chain disruptions, on employment in green jobs, on research capacity building, and numerous other timely and relevant topics. Some of our speakers were from academia; others from industry, and several are best-selling authors. We attempt to provide a diversity of topics.

We do not require that students attend these talks but those who see the value of them rarely miss one. No speaker has ever canceled on us.

The Female Science Professor, who is an anonymous blogger (and about whose blog I have written about in my blog and I have directly communicated with her as well), writes a monthly column in The Chronicle of Higher Education. This month's article by her, coincidentally, is on departmental seminar series and you can read it here. In the article, she focuses on answering specific questions regarding departmental speaker series. The one that I am involved in is much broader, but she does make many relevant points. Specifically, she says that: many departments believe it is money well spent because of the educational benefits and the positive impact on the department's visibility. Moreover, she states that: In my experience, organized and motivated people are the best organizers—no matter their academic position.

As for our Speaker Series, I have provided the funding for it over 12 semesters, and have even used thousands of dollars from a research award that I received to jump start it. My academic department funds the lunches and every year or so we get additional support for 1 speaker from the INFORMS Speaker Program. I have missed only a handful of the presentations in the past 6 years, even while I was on sabbatical as a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

We still have two more speakers in our series this term and are delighted that Professor Bertsimas of the Sloan School at MIT, who is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering, will be speaking on April 23. We conclude this year's talks with the lecture of Professor Gumus, of McGill University in Canada, on April 30.

However, all good things must, eventually, come to an end. After this semester, I will no longer be able to fund this Speaker Series and to devote weeks every year to its success. This series has helped the chapter garner three national awards from INFORMS and its various officers (two so far) the Judith Liebman award. We will see whether the institution provides financial support as well as whether another "leader" will step forward to continue this intellectually engaging and esprit de corps building activity that has immeasurably enriched the educational experiences on our campus.

As for tips on running a student chapter, please click here. The chapter best practices guide on that link was co-authored by my former doctoral student, Dr. Tina Wakolbinger, who was the first President of our Chapter in 2004-2005 and who received the Judith Liebman award for her outstanding service of the chapter. It contains additional tips on hosting a Speaker Series.

To Be or Not To Be (an Anonymous Blogger)

In many instances, I would have liked to have maintained an anonymous blog in which, in parallel, I could expound on some of the truly unique experiences of being a female professor in a technical field. Of course, one could assemble and compile such ruminations and ultimately write them all up in a memoir, which probably would not be anonymous.

One has choices: to write an anonymous blog (in which case it is then easier to admit comments) or to write under one's name (and to allow comments or not).

Two of my favorite anonymous blogs are: FemaleScienceProfessor and Transportation Research 101, written by "Safetea Lu." The former blog is written by a female full professor at a major research university, whereas the latter is written by a transportation professor (whose name I think I have figured out). Both of these blogs have unique features and speak to the reality of being an academic researcher and teacher. Both are informative and entertaining. In fact, some of the musings of Safetea Lu on Massachusetts and transportation research I found very interesting.

As for blogs that have names associated with them, some of my favorites can be found at: alltop operations research. I also recommend Professor David Levinson's blog and, of course, Tom Vanderbilt's blog. Professor Levinson is scheduled to give a seminar at Northwestern University on January 21, 2010. I will be at Northwestern at a symposium but one week later. Tom Vanderbilt, the author of the terrific book, Traffic, spoke in our Speaker Series at the Isenberg School last year. Yesterday, my husband marched to our local cafe in North Amherst, the Cushman General Store. There he joined two of his friends who were having a hearty breakfast and the conversation was about Vanderbilt's book and a discussion on safety and rules and regulations ensued. This is a mark of a great book and speaker -- months and years after, the audience still finds insights gleaned for discussion!