Prepared remarks of UC Berkeley Professor Alice M. Agogino 

“I am honored to present a tribute to Chancellor Denton’s academic accomplishments. I have worked hard to summarize them in 15 minutes. Not an easy task given that her resume is 50 pages long. I thank all of her friends and colleagues who helped me write this tribute.

Chancellor Denice D. Denton exemplified the ideal academic, with strengths in all areas of academic achievement: interdisciplinary research, innovative approaches to education, and a dedication to service. For the last 20 years, her contributions have had profound impact in academe, industry and the public. She shaped the direction of our nation’s science and engineering enterprise through her research, teaching, technology development, service, leadership, mentoring, public communication of science and engineering, initiatives to promote diversity and inclusion, and K-12 outreach.

Chancellor Denton earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a doctoral thesis titled ‘Moisture Transport in Polyimide Films in Integrated Circuits.’ She also received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering, an Electrical Engineering degree, and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from M.I.T. as well. I did not know her as a student at M.I.T., but those who did say she showed early academic promise and leadership skills. And yes, she fought some good battles there. I recall her telling me that she was concerned about the climate for female students there and was active in exposing problems and making improvements. For example, she developed and taught a course for women students that, for many, served as their first academic exposure to engineering and technology. Years later she would be asked to return to serve on M.I.T.’s Advisory Board for Initiatives to Diversify the Professoriate.

I first met Denice at a ceremony honoring awardees of the prestigious Presidential Young Investigator Awards from the National Science Foundation, which have now morphed into the NSF Career awards. Only 25 of the awards were given out at this time in a highly competitive process that included final approval by the president of the United States. Denice Denton won the PYI in 1987 and I had won a couple years earlier in 1985. Her future life partner, Gretchen Kalonji, won one of the inaugural awards in 1984. Our award certificates were huge and signed by President Ronald Reagan. Although absolutely thrilled and honored by the award, we did get a chuckle out of the signature and having it on the walls of our offices.

In 1990, Joe Bordogna, the assistant director of engineering at NSF, sponsored a Presidential Young Investigator Colloquium on U.S. Engineering, Mathematics, and Science Education for the Year 2010. Denice Denton was nominated to attend for her demonstrable concern for precollege and undergraduate education and for their potential for future academic leadership. The charge to the group was to state their vision and recommendations on how to achieve high-quality precollege and undergraduate instruction in engineering, mathematics, and the sciences for everyone by the year 2010. NSF's Sue Kemnitzer marks this colloquy as Denice’s emergence as a national leader in higher education.

As a young faculty member she was also instrumental in the 1996 NSF report ‘Shaping the Future: New Expectations for Undergraduate Education in Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology,’ which revitalized the NSF programs for undergraduate education. Denice focused her PYI research on developing the foundation for what would become leading-edge research in MEM—microelectromechanical systems—technology, such as her work in the Materials Development and Processing for Fabrication of Microdynamical Optical Switches. She published over 100 research papers in her discipline. Her most recent work focused on micron-level enabling technologies in life sciences and neurobiology. She served in a number of high-level advisory capacities in her disciplinary research. She served on the National Resource Council's committee on Advanced Materials and Fabrication Methods for MEMS from 1995-1997 and on a number of NSF advisory boards.

Most recently, she served on the advisory board for NSF’s nanoscale science and engineering program and the selection committee for the NSF Alan Waterman Award, a $500,000 award which goes to the most outstanding scientist, mathematician or engineer under 35. In 2004, President George W. Bush appointed Denice to the National Medal of Science Selection Committee, charged with selecting the recipient of our nation’s highest award for distinguished contributions to science. The quality of Denice Denton’s research won her wide acclaim and she could have had a place in academic history just based on her contributions to her discipline. But Denice had much more to offer.

Starting as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1987 in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, she made profound changes to academe and the nation, leaving a rich legacy. While at Wisconsin, Denice became recognized as a national leader in engineering education, chaired the National Academy’s Board on Engineering Education and took the lead in a number of K-12 projects, including the development of a microfabrication kit for use in K-12 settings. Her accomplishments and recognition did not come easily. As the first woman in the department of electrical and computer engineering and one of very few women in the College of Engineering of 180 faculty, her struggles against gender discrimination during her early years at Wisconsin are legendary.

During her second year at Wisconsin, she walked into her building and was stopped by a man changing the locks to the shared ‘microfabrication clean room’ for the department. Her so-called faculty mentor, the director of the lab, had the locks changed. He was keeping Denice and her students from doing research. Without the laboratory research, Denice had no hope of making further progress on her tenure track and the clock was ticking. She got no support from her department chair or dean at the time. After engaging a lawyer and finding allies across the campus, the provost finally stepped in.

Years later, as a member of the advisory board for the Radcliffe Science Institute, I had an opportunity to speak to the infamous Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, about why his remarks struck a raw nerve with participants like Denice who were in the room. He had said that discrimination, such as what she faced, was a tertiary reason why women did not go or succeed in science or engineering, speculating that the primary reasons were (1) women didn’t want to work as hard as men and (2) it’s in the genes. I’ll say more on Larry Summers later. Denice’s goal of making technical opportunities and understanding of the physical world accessible and attractive to a broad range of people was the foundation of a number of major NSF projects that she created, championed and led.

One of these, the National Institute for Science Education was focused on increasing interest in science and mathematics from kindergarten to college students. NISE was particularly revolutionary because it represented one of the first partnerships between a School of Education and a School of Engineering to solve a very hard educational problem. Denice codirected the College of Engineering’s Manufacturing Engineering Education for the Future grant and founded the National Institute for Science Education, which was housed in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. This institute was a collaborative effort of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, the School of Education, the College of Engineering, and the College of Letters and Science. At Wisconsin, Denice was an extremely popular and effective teacher. Quoting Jo Handelsman, Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor in the UW-Madison department of plant pathology, she was ‘a towering figure in science, education and social justice. She was a terrific scientist, an innovative educator, and fierce advocate for women and minorities in higher education. Her passion and tireless work on every educational agenda she embraced made her emblematic of the best and purest aspects of higher education.’

In addition to the Presidential Young Investigator award, during her tenure at Wisconsin Denice Denton earned an incredible number of other awards. She won the first Harriett B. Rigas Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1995. Denton was cited as ‘an exceptionally innovative instructor, noted for her teaching techniques, enhancing local and national engineering education and relating to real-world problems.’ [Campus leaders reflect on Denice Denton’s life, career: http://www.news.wisc.edu/12679.html]

She also won the George Westinghouse Award for excellence in engineering education from the American Society for Engineering Education in 1995; the W. M. Keck Foundation Engineering Teaching Excellence Award in1994; the Benjamin Smith Reynolds Teaching Award in 1994; the Eta Kappa Nu C. Holmes MacDonald Distinguished Young Electrical Engineer National Teaching Award in 1993; the American Society of Engineering Education AT&T Foundation Teaching Award in 1991; the Kiekhofer Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Wisconsin in 1990.

Denice left Wisconsin in 1996 to become dean of the College of Engineering and professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington, the first woman to hold such a position at a National Research Council-designated Research One university. She brought the College up in the national rankings and significantly increased the level of industry and foundation funding. Ed Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, was immediately impressed. ‘She was smart, she was articulate… I quickly learned that she also possessed enormous measures of vision, courage, integrity, and backbone. Denice was strong: she had faced adversity at every stage of her career, she had met it head-on, and she had emerged a winner, improving all of those around her. She had so much more to give, and she deserved so much better than she got.’

During her nine years as Dean of Engineering at the University of Washington, Denice worked with her faculty to launch innovative new education programs sponsored by NSF, including the NSF Graduate Teaching Fellows in K-12 Education, DO-IT program for persons with disabilities, and the ADVANCE institutional transformation project. She created programs and strategies to match school-age girls with university students working on robotics and web design projects. She served as principal investigator for a National Science Foundation ADVANCE grant to eliminate barriers for women in the science, engineering and math workplaces. She also supported junior faculty in grants writing with the result that sponsored research funding at the College of Engineering more than doubled. With Mary Cook, Jessica Yellin, and Karen Kasonic, Denice Denton developed and taught a service learning grant course in collaboration with the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology. The course was “a unique partnership with 10 prominent, leading high-tech companies and a number of community groups together seeking new and systematic ways to pull more women into computing and engineering fields through service learning. This course had a tiered mentoring structure, in which faculty mentors, industry mentors, community organization clients and mentors, graduate student mentors, and undergraduate mentors worked with teams of undergraduate students on term-long research and service learning projects in order to improve the lives of women through technology. I was awed by her students’ presentations at the annual meeting of the Anita Borg Institute of Women and Technology in Palo Alto.

As dean of engineering at the University of Washington, Denice was the first in the country to recognize the need for a research approach to understanding learning in engineering and in 1998 developed Washington’s Center for Engineering Learning and Teaching—the first center in the nation in a College of Engineering to combine a research and faculty development mission. She also was tireless in her efforts to raise an endowment to support the Center and just before she left for Santa Cruz she was successful in obtaining $2 million for an endowed chair for the center director, Cindy Atman. Since its inception in 1998, CELT has had noticeable local, national, and even international impact. The Colorado School of Mines started the Center for Engineering Education, patterned after CELT, and a number of other universities, including Brown University, Ohio State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas at Austin, and Vanderbilt University have used CELT as a model for their own institutions. Further, the National Academy of Engineering started the Center for the Advancement of Scholarship, also modeled on CELT.

Denice Denton continued to build partnerships and collaborative projects at the University of Washington. Funded at $11 million from the National Science Foundation, the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education is focused on advancing our understanding of how people become engineers. Denice’s vision and energy are the basis for this ongoing center. Stanford’s Sheri Sheppard says, ‘Denice’s intellect, good humor and inclusive nature were key to putting together a highly productive team of faculty, deans, and graduate student researchers.’

Denice was always the champion for student empowerment and voice. Her initiatives and teaching awards speak to this. Most recently, when she discovered that a student demonstration at a campus Career Fair last April was classified by the Pentagon as a ‘credible threat’ to national security, she wasted no time defending students and protesting to Congress and the Bush Administration. Her courageous and quick response was heard around the country: ‘While my colleagues and I deplore and do not tolerate violence, we believe that debate and peaceful demonstration are hallmarks of a democracy. Given the crucial role of universities in providing a venue for the free exchange of ideas, it would be extremely disconcerting if political dissent were equated with national threat, thus justifying covert action. Such actions stifle free speech and can result in a dangerous climate of intellectual conformity. In fact, an environment of surveillance and intimidation threatens the core values of universities and of our nation and sounds chilling echoes of the McCarthy era.’ [Pentagon monitoring of UCSC protest, http://chancellor.ucsc.edu/pentagon/]

Even with all of these remarkable academic achievements, Denice might best be remembered for the extraordinary quality and high impact of her contributions as a mentor, inspirational speaker and role model. As a keynote speaker at numerous conferences and to industry, Denice was consistently popular and insightful. She never left a dull moment. She used humor and candid life stories to inspire, motivate and deliver workable advice. MentorNet’s Carol Miller says Denice’s colorful phrases ‘were right on the mark, and she used them to communicate effectively, get attention, and get right to the point with a broad audience and make her point in an egalitarian way. In a world of higher education elitism, she was a breath of fresh air.’

Stanford’s Sheri Sheppard comments on her ability to engage with young and diverse audiences: ‘With her brightly colored glasses and incredibly curly hair, she made engineering exciting and made us feel like we belonged.’ Denice earned an international reputation for effective advocacy, supporting access to science, math, and engineering opportunities for women and minorities. In May 2004, Denton was among nine scholars honored by the White House with a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring, recognizing her role as a major leader in enhancing diversity in science and engineering. As chancellor of UC Santa Cruz, Denice also won the 2006 Maria Mitchell Women in Science Award, a prestigious national recognition of exceptional work that advances opportunities in the sciences for women and girls. Most recently she won the 2006 Educator of the Year Award from the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals.

In addition to student mentoring and giving of herself as a role model, Denice had huge impact as a mentor of mentors, mentoring women and minorities further along in the academic pipeline. Her contributions include developing programs to mentor junior faculty on strategies for success in academe; efforts to enhance the ethnic and gender diversity of science and engineering faculty; and the personal mentoring of senior faculty and even deans. The ‘big win’ of this activity has been an exponential increase in the numbers of women and minority students affected, as each of the mentors succeeds in her/his own career and is thus able to mentor others. One of her mentees, Mary Lidstrom, associate dean for new initiatives in engineering at the University of Washington, sums it up with: ‘The most powerful effect of Denice’s mentorship is the enthusiasm she has instilled in me to do the same for others, passing on the skills I have learned in the same way she has done this for me.’

I cannot speak of Denice’s academic contributions to women in science and engineering without some mention of the Larry Summers incident. I mention this as an example of how she used wit and humor to turn around a damaging situation. On Monday, January 17, 2005, I got e-mail from Denice titled ‘Denice Does Boston—Newsflash from Harvard president—girls can’t do math! I was in Boston for 36 hours this week. Bit of a culture clash.’ She goes on to talk about her experience at the conference. The dialogue she started with colleague Nancy Hopkins let to a ‘tiger team’ e-mail list as well as numerous conferences and events across the country. The tsunami that transpired (her words) motivated the National Academy to form the Committee on Maximizing the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering. Denice and I are both members of this committee, and Denice gave the closing remarks at our Convocation on Maximizing the Potential of Women in Academe: Biological, Social, and Organizational Contributions to Science and Engineering Success. The committee is chaired by Donna Shalala, president of the University of Miami, former chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services under the Clinton administration. I would like to close by reading a letter Donna Shalala asked me to read at this memorial:

Dear Carolyn and Gretchen,

Denice Denton was an extraordinarily talented scholar, educational leader, and relentless voice for progress. She was bigger than life. She opened doors, and stood in them to let others through. She mentored young scholars and students. Her enthusiasm for science was clear and infectious. 

She was a force—a magnificent force. She pushed the institutions she inhabited to be better than they wanted to be. The National Academies Committee on Maximizing the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering will honor her memory by dedicating our upcoming report to her. This decision has been enthusiastically endorsed by the presidents of the National Academies: President Ralph Cicerone of the National Academy of Sciences, President Bill Wulf of the National Academy of Engineering, and President Harvey Fineberg of the Institute of Medicine. Denice was a “first” in most categories of the report.

Being at the forefront made her a target. Her tragic death highlights that we have much further to go. She was an active committee member, and also delivered the closing address at the committee’s Convocation on Biological, Social, and Organizational Components of Success last December. In that address, she said,

“I’m going to offer you a set of recommendations that will cost you nothing but courage. They can also be used more broadly well beyond the hallowed halls, and thus impact the ‘cross-institutional interlock,’ or as I would say as an electrical engineer, ‘the system.’ First of all, we should have zero tolerance for bullying behavior. It should not be acceptable in the workplace or anywhere else. If you are an academic leader, you should confront faculty and others who are abusive to students, staff and other faculty, particularly senior faculty. Tenure is not a license to kill. There are limits to acceptable behavior in the academy. How many of you have seen on an academic campus, senior people with tenure over and over abuse people who are lower than them in the power structure, and nobody ever does anything? Why does that happen? Why do we let that happen? It's unacceptable.

If you have issues with dealing with conflict and you are an academic leader, take a class. Get help. Seek support. People don’t want to confront each other. But we have to. It’s our job. It’s in the position description. We can learn from conflict. We do learn from conflict. Confront people’s biases. When biases come out if you’re an academic leader or anything else, confront people’s bias. And here is another one, and this is not a popular one, but I’m just throwing it in there. Support your local senior feminist colleagues, male and female. It’s lonely at the top.”

I cannot imagine a world without Denice. We have all lost a friend, a colleague, and a champion. We will miss her.

Sincerely,

Donna E. Shalala’ ”

(Return to Memorial Remarks page)