Harvard University Mathematics Department Hires SECOND EVER Female Tenured Full Professor

Harvard University is considered the acme of most things academic, with its 37 billion dollar endowment and its perennial placement at the top of the college rankings. The  Mathematics department at Harvard is not the very best in the country (that distinction usually goes to Princeton University) but it is definitely well-known. The fact that they have been atrocious in the area of doversity for so long is widely known.

This week comes news that things are starting to change at Harvard, as they announced they have hired their second ever tenure female full professor, ending a six-year stint in which they literally had zero tenured female professors (by contrast Princeton has had two senior female math professors for years: Maria Chudnovsky and Sun-Yung Alice Chang).

The Daily Crimson reports:

University of California at Berkeley math professors Lauren K. Williams ’00 and Denis Auroux will join Harvard’s math department as senior faculty at the start of the next academic year, Department Chair Curtis T. McMullen said in an interview last week. 

Auroux has served as a math professor at UC Berkeley since 2009 and has published articles on subjects ranging from “symplectic submanifolds” to “Lefschetz pencils.” Williams, a former math concentrator, won a tenured associate professorship at UC Berkeley in 2013—and a full tenured professor position there in 2016—and has written extensively about cluster algebras and tropical geometry.

As a friend of mine said on Twitter this weekend in commenting on the news. "It's 2018."

David Boone: From Homeless To Harvard

David Boone, 19, has been admitted to Harvard
and many other Ivy League universities

Previously I had blogged about the amazing story of Khadijah Williams, an African-American homeless girl who lived on Skid Row in Los Angeles and who was admitted to and is now thriving at Harvard University. I guess such heart-warming stories are not as rare as I first thought. Today I bring you the story of David Boone, a homeless African-American boy from Cleveland  who will be going to Harvard starting in Fall 2012!

You really should read this entire article on David Boone at The Cleveland Plain Dealer:

David, 18, credits [ MC²STEM High School] both with engaging him more in class and with raising his standards so that he could not accept mediocrity. The result was academic success: He expects to be the salutatorian of his school's first graduating class.

And he was accepted at 22 of the 23 colleges he applied to. Turned down only by his top choice, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he's one of the few people who will attend Harvard as a fallback option.

While David is softspoken, with a healthy amount of modesty, his achievement is a source of pride for Cleveland school officials, who rave about him. His success is even more impressive given his background.

He has little contact with his father, he says, and has not lived regularly with his mother, Moneeke Davis, since eighth grade. After a neighborhood gang shot up her Eddy Road home, the family had to split into several places, he says, and David has bounced from home to home, sometimes living on the streets.

I love these kinds of stories! If you readers here of any similar stories of against-the-odds successes, feel free to leave links to them in the comments. In a couple of years I will try and follow up and find out how David is doing at Harvard. Happily he received a Gates Millenium scholarship so almost all of his expenses will be paid for while he is at college.

UPDATE: Homeless Black girl now thriving at Harvard

The story of Khadijah Williams, "the homeless black girl from Los Angeles who went from Skid Row to Harvard," has been in my thoughts lately. I first blogged about her incredible story way back in 2009, and since then she has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and is apparently thriving at the most prestigious university in the country.

Thanks to the power of Google (and a pretty distinctive first name) it was pretty easy to get an update on how Khadijah is doing now. She's in her Junior year at Harvard, majoring in Sociology, and an occasional blogger herself!

Here's an excerpt from one of her recent posts:

What makes students from our background “disadvantaged” is our understanding of parts of the world, which are different than (but not inferior to) the ways that are valued in this society. I have friends who are wealthy and have tons of intellectual learning, but not much experiential learning like you and I have. Going to college has allowed me to understand the importance of both. I’ve learned so much about the world talking to my friends and conversing with professors, reading books, and the like. But my experience and the learning that comes from it has allowed me to fully appreciate other experiences I had, such as my trip to South Africa (more at a later post). A lot of times, it seems all I hear as a low income student is how “disadvantaged” I am, how “lacking” I am as a nontraditional student. But going to college has helped me understand how my own background has given me the ability to appreciate experiences and situations at an experiential and an intellectual level.

Clearly, she knows how to write, and more importantly, also knows how to think. I am just happy that everything turned out fine. First Female Black President of the United States, anyone?

A DIFFERENT Mad Professah Gets Arrested

Oh lawdy! Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr., one of the most prominent African American professors in the United States, was arrested by Cambridge Police last week for allegedly breaking and entering into his own house.

From the Boston Globe's coverage:

The scene - two black men on the porch of a stately home on a tree-lined Cambridge street in the middle of the day - triggered events that were at turns dramatic and bizarre, a confrontation between one of the nation’s foremost African-American scholars and a police sergeant responding to a call that someone was breaking into the house.

It ended when Gates, 58, was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct in allegedly shouting at the officer; he was eventually taken away in handcuffs.

But the encounter is anything but over. Some of Gates’s outraged colleagues said the run-in proves that even in a liberal enclave like Harvard Square, even with someone of Gates’s accomplishments, a black man is a suspect before he is a resident.

“It’s unbelievable,’’ said Lawrence Bobo, a Harvard sociologist who visited Gates at the police station last Thursday and drove him home after Gates posted the $40 bail. “I felt as if I were in some kind of surreal moment, like ‘The Twilight Zone.’ I was mortified. . . . This is a humiliating thing and a pretty profound violation of the kind of trust we all take for granted.’’

Neither Gates - who was named one of Time magazine’s most influential Americans in 1997 and now directs the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard - nor police would comment on the incident yesterday.

Gates’s lawyer and Harvard colleague, Charles Ogletree, said what angered his client was that the police officer stepped inside Gates’s Ware Street house, uninvited, to demand identification and question him.

Gates showed his Harvard identification and Massachusetts drivers license with his home address, Ogletree said, adding, “Even after presentation of ID, the officer was still questioning his presence.’’

Said Bobo: “The whole interaction should have ended right there, but I guess that wasn’t enough. The officer felt he hadn’t been deferred to sufficiently.’’

The Cambridge police report describes a chaotic scene in which the police sergeant stood at Gates’s door, demanded identification, and radioed for assistance from Harvard University police when Gates presented him with a Harvard ID. A visibly upset Gates responded to the officer’s assertion that he was responding to a report of a break-in with, “Why, because I’m a black man in America?’’

“Gates then turned to me and told me that I had no idea who I was ‘messing’ with and that I had not heard the last of it,’’ the report said. “While I was led to believe that Gates was lawfully in the residence, I was quite surprised and confused with the behavior he exhibited toward me.’’

When the officer repeatedly told Gates he would speak with him outside, the normally mild-mannered professor shouted, “Ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside,’’ according to the report.

Gates was arrested after “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior’’ toward the officer who questioned him, the report said.

Professor Gates has released a short statement through his lawyer, Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree.

As he was talking to the Harvard Real Estate office on his portable phone in his house, he observed a uniformed officer on his front porch. When Professor Gates opened the door, the officer immediately asked him to step outside. Professor Gates remained inside his home and asked the officer why he was there. The officer indicated that he was responding to a 911 call about a breaking and entering in progress at this address. Professor Gates informed the officer that he lived there and was a faculty member at Harvard University. The officer then asked Professor Gates whether he could prove that he lived there and taught at Harvard. Professor Gates said that he could, and turned to walk into his kitchen, where he had left his wallet. The officer followed him. Professor Gates handed both his Harvard University identification and his valid Massachusetts driver’s license to the officer. Both include Professor Gates’ photograph, and the license includes his address.

Professor Gates then asked the police officer if he would give him his name and his badge number. He made this request several times. The officer did not produce any identification nor did he respond to Professor Gates’ request for this information. After an additional request by Professor Gates for the officer’s name and badge number, the officer then turned and left the kitchen of Professor Gates’ home without ever acknowledging who he was or if there were charges against Professor Gates. As Professor Gates followed the officer to his own front door, he was astonished to see several police officers gathered on his front porch. Professor Gates asked the officer’s colleagues for his name and badge number. As Professor Gates stepped onto his front porch, the officer who had been inside and who had examined his identification, said to him, “Thank you for accommodating my earlier request,” and then placed Professor Gates under arrest. He was handcuffed on his own front porch.

Professor Gates was taken to the Cambridge Police Station where he remained for approximately 4 hours before being released that evening. Professor Gates’ counsel has been cooperating with the Middlesex District Attorneys Office, and the City of Cambridge, and is hopeful that this matter will be resolved promptly. Professor Gates will not be making any other statements concerning this matter at this time.

What do you think should have happened?

Black Homeless L.A. Teen Girl Heads To Harvard

(Brian Vander Brug/Los Angeles Times)

There was a great story in Friday's Los Angeles Times about a local homeless African-American teenaged girl who is attending Harvard this fall. Her name is Khadijah Williams:

As long as she can remember, Khadijah has floated from shelters to motels to armories along the West Coast with her mother. She has attended 12 schools in 12 years; lived out of garbage bags among pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers. Every morning, she upheld her dignity, making sure she didn't smell or look disheveled.

On the streets, she learned how to hunt for their next meal, plot the next bus route and help choose a secure place to sleep -- survival skills she applied with passion to her education.

[...]

Khadijah was in third grade when she first realized the power of test scores, placing in the 99th percentile on a state exam. Her teachers marked the 9-year-old as gifted, a special category that Khadijah, even at that early age, vowed to keep.

"I still remember that exact number," Khadijah said. "It meant only 0.01 students tested better than I did."

In the years that followed, her mother, Chantwuan Williams, pulled her out of school eight more times. When shelters closed, money ran out or her mother didn't feel safe, they packed what little they carried and boarded buses to find housing in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Ventura, San Diego, San Bernardino and Orange County, staying for months, at most, in one place.

She finished only half of fourth grade, half of fifth and skipped sixth. Seventh grade was split between Los Angeles and San Diego. Eighth grade consisted of two weeks in San Bernardino.

At every stop, Khadijah pushed to keep herself in each school's gifted program. She read nutrition charts, newspapers and four to five books a month, anything to transport her mind away from the chaos and the sour smell.

At school, she was the outsider. At the shelter, she was often bullied. "You ain't college-bound," the pimps barked. "You live in skid row!"

In 10th grade, Khadijah realized that if she wanted to succeed, she couldn't do it alone. She began to reach out to organizations and mentors: the Upward Bound Program, Higher Edge L.A., Experience Berkeley and South Central Scholars; teachers, counselors and college alumni networks. They helped her enroll in summer community college classes, gave her access to computers and scholarship applications and taught her about networking.

It's exactly programs like these that will be threatened by California's financial mess. How many more Khadijah Wlliams will not be able to be rescued because the safety net has been slashed by budget cuts?

I strongly urge you to read the entire inspiring story by reporter Esmeralda Bermudez, "She finally has a home: Harvard."

$100M Donation To Help Harvard & MIT AIDS Research

Finally some good news about HIV/AIDS!

A Massachusetts businessman [named Phillip T. Ragon] has donated $100 million to fund research into the development of an AIDS vaccine[.]

The gift, which will flow through [Massachusetts general Hospital] will be shared with Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

"By providing flexible funding and by connecting science and engineering at MIT and Harvard with the research and clinical resources of MGH, we intend to empower many of the world's best researchers to focus on what they view as the most promising research," Ragon said in a statement.

The institute will bring scientists and clinicians together to better understand how the body fights infections and ultimately to apply that understanding to a broad range of infectious diseases and cancers.

It will be lead by Dr. Bruce Walker, an MGH researcher and physician and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

The initial work of the institute will focus on identifying the effective immune responses in a small group of people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, who are able to keep their virus in check without medications. It will work to design strategies to reproduce those responses.