Rodin discusses women in academia, policies at Penn

JOHN YI/YH University of Pennsylvania President Judith Rodin spoke at the Law School on Tuesday, October 12.

On Tues., Oct. 12, University of Pennsylvania President and Chubb Fellow Judith Rodin addressed a crowded Law School auditorium on "The University and a Civil Society." Rodin made history in 1994 when she became the first female president of an Ivy League institution. Rodin was also a member of the Yale faculty from 1972 until 1993—first as the only tenured woman in the Psychology Department, and then as Dean of the Graduate School (1991-92) and Provost (1992-94). The Herald sat down with Rodin.

Yale Herald:When you first came to Yale, did you feel that academia was dominated by white men?

Judith Rodin: I think that for a long time, to us as junior faculty, we felt like visitors. It wasn't unfriendly. It wasn't unpleasant. It's just like we didn't quite feel like we really belonged here. And then, as more and more women became faculty members, and as everyone forgot to be so self-conscious about it, it stopped being an issue. But I definitely felt like a woman in a male institution. I dedicated the Maya Lin piece [the women's table] when I was provost. It was really very wonderful to celebrate 25 years of [coeducation] at Yale. It transformed Yale and made it better.

YH: What do you think about the recent controversy at Yale over the small number of tenured women faculty members? What do you think Yale could do about it?

JR: I think we can all learn a lesson from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. In the last year, the tenured women at MIT finally got through to the administration and showed with hard data the ways that they were disadvantaged. The administration was incredulous. What it did was say, I hope to all of us, "Pay attention." There is something real going on in institutions like ours. Women aren't feeling as good as they are at our institutions. We can't just look at the numbers. We really need to look and understand what life is like, what life we are creating, the kind of support we are giving—research support, support for teaching, to our women. And is this the same as the men are getting? I don't know the answer. But it's certainly something that we at Penn are taking a hard look at.

YH: What do you say to critics who say that women shouldn't get preferential treatment because of their gender?

JR: There are as many excellent women as excellent men. The criterion is to let excellence determine access. If you follow that rule unfettered by gender or race or any other shackles that we use in our society at the present time, then of course there will be opportunities for women of excellence. The problem is that often those variables do matter. We spend a lot of time as a society worrying about those variables tipping the scale favorably for people and not enough times thinking about the times that these variables have tipped the scale unfavorably for people, whether it's gender or race.

YH: Under your leadership, Pennsylvania has begun a $300 million plan to transform residential life. Was much of the re-organization the result of seeing the Yale residential college experience? What are the differences between Penn's residential college life and Yale's?

JR: Yale's residential colleges are so central to life at Yale, and really embody a large component of the Yale undergraduate experience. When we thought about residential colleges, we wanted to create experiences that were more in keeping with the tradition of Penn's history. Penn has had some residential units that were "live and learning" programs that focused on themes. And we chose to develop our college houses, which will have all four classes, from frosh to seniors—which is unlike Yale, half around themes and half open residential experience—which is more like Yale's. We think there's a tremendous [amount of] generation learning across the four years. And we would really like that kind of mixing to occur residentially. We don't have the capacity to house all of our undergraduate body on campus. Our students choose what colleges they are in and they can change at the end of every year. So it's completely a selection process and a choice process. We think it's an incredible success. This year, we have all of our rooms filled up for the first time in about eight to 10 years. We are also experimenting and planning new residences, which are going to be very different from what's in place at Yale and at Penn right now. These new residences are going to be more apartment-like with their own central and social cores.

YH: You banned alcohol from all undergraduate events last spring after the alcohol-induced death of Michael Tobin '94 at a fraternity event this March. Could you please talk about Penn's new alcohol policy?

JR: The death of our alum made me do what I did. There was nothing clearer to tell the students that it was not about age: it's about the fact that at any age, if you behave irresponsibly with alcohol, you are vulnerable. We suspended all alcohol use at any undergraduate event in order to look at the problem. We had a largely student-driven committee working with the Provost and came up with the recommendation to not have hard liquor at any college event. What I think is incredible is that when the graduate students came back this fall, they voted to support the undergrads' decision to not serve hard liquor at their parties. And the faculty senate just voted to not serve hard liquor at their parties either. We also have now stepped up social events on Thursday nights through Sunday nights to increase alcohol-free capacity to have fun. We are trying to demonstrate that it's the amount that you drink that matters and not the fact that you drink

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