A dean of their own

ENGINEERING STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON KNOW THAT DEVICE DENTON, A SELFDESCRIBED "BULLDOZER," WILL MOVE MOUNTAINS WHEN IT COMES TO THEIR EDUCATION.

hen Denice Denton got her first teaching job on the engineering faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, she was the only woman and joined 179 men. For months, she didn't have access to the lab where she and her students needed to work, because of a surly colleague who had changed the locks and because other male colleagues were too fearful to cross him. Denton is currently the engineering dean at the University of Washington in Seattle, and people still mistake her for staff and ask her for coffee at conferences. But instead of getting discouraged by these experiences, Denton has made it her mission to improve students' experiences at engineering school, particularly for women and minorities.

In the past five years as the University of Washington's dean of engineering, Denton has revitalized the school and made it a more inviting environment for nontraditional engineering students and faculty alike. Creating the strongest set of diversity programs in the nation, she has successfully increased the number of female and underrepresented minority students, hired a more diverse staff, and made the University of Washington a model that schools across the nation, from Texas A&M University to the University of California, Berkeley, are following.

What seems especially promising about Denton's approach to the diversity issue is that it doesn't involve complicated formulas or cumbersome programs. Her style is more straightforward, human, and down-to-earth. "Engineers love to solve problems, and here is a problem that's been staring us in the face for a long time," Denton says. "It's not such a hard problem to solve. It just takes a genuine desire to do so."

Where there's a will, there's a way. And if there is a secret to Denton's success, it may be her tremendous willpower to change the system. She sometimes jokes that she is a "bulldozer" for others. "I have always had a really strong sense of social justice and equity," she explains. "As long as I can remember, I have seen people around me being excluded and known that it wasn't right." In her career, Denton is markedly inclusive, showing a devotion to each student's development that warms the atmosphere of the engineering school. "From the outset of my stay at UW, I realized that Denise was extremely committed to my research goals," says post-doctoral researcher Yael Hanein. "I know that others at the college, regardless of race or gender, enjoy the same kind of dedication.. diversity has been a very welcome product of this approach."

Denton, 41, was born in a rural farm town not far from Houston, Texas. "It was racist, sexist, and horribly oppressive," she recalls. "I couldn't wait to get out of there." Luckily, Denton's mother was a high school calculus teacher who kept her immune from the notion that math and science aren't for girls. Young Denton was further inspired by her uncle Gilbert, who worked with NASA on history-making projects such as the design of a lunar buggy. A summer program at Rice University after her junior year in high school sealed Denton's decision to make a life in technology, and her bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. would all be earned at M.LT. Right off the bat as an undergraduate, Denton chose as her independent project to design a course for non-engineering women students to show them the joys of "techie stuff' like building circuits and handling a soldering iron. "I have always had a desire to show people how truly exciting engineering can be," she explains.

Upon graduation, Denton was offered teaching jobs at seven colleges, and at each, she would be the only woman on the engineering faculty. She chose the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Being the only woman on the faculty, the isolation from all the usual collegial networks was severe. Nonetheless, Denton persevered and managed to earn tenure within five years and to collect national awards and accolades for her work, such as the IEEE Professor of the Year Award and the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation.

She quickly became the most popular teacher on campus, winning more student awards than any other engineering faculty member. In 1994, Denton designed a new class for freshmen engineering students, to give them a taste of what the field is really like in hopes of preventing so many dropouts. At most universities, at least 15 percent of students drop out by the end of their first year and, even more troubling, 35 percent of women decide that engineering isn't for them. That is not surprising, says Denton, because so many of the early courses do not get at the essence of what engineering has to offer but instead cover the more basic, abstract subjects like calculus. The first semester of her experimental class involved designing access for the disabled to over 50 historically preserved homesteads from 150 years ago that make up a tourist site known as "Old Wisconsin." The hands-on class was a huge hit, soon became a requirement at the school, and proved Denton to be a truly student-oriented professor. The following year, the National Science Foundation created a new national Institute for Science Education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and named Denton co-head of the $10 million organization, designed to systematically study results of education reforms in math and science, and engineering and technology.