Diversity Statement
Living abroad informs my appreciation of a welcoming community. Cologne is an easy-going city which broadly embraces diversity, immigrants, and refugees. As an ‘ex-pat’ rather than an ‘immigrant’, I am a global citizen with a position of privilege. I am invited. And it is comparatively easy—many people in Germany speak English well, for example. I pass as German (as long as I don’t have to talk too much). Nevertheless, it is a constant challenge, even with the warmth and active welcome I receive making it substantially easier. I can only imagine—with dread—what it would be to feel unwelcome. I have seen first-hand how a welcoming community can radically improve a difficult experience. There are many roads to success. Whole-heartedly helping one another is the highest standard to which we can aspire.
I’ve been lucky to enjoy diverse places throughout my career. At the University of Maryland, and living in DC, there were students rich and poor. In-state students, out-of-state students, and international students. Recent immigrants and Marylanders who loved Old Bay on their crab. At Livermore and in Berkeley there were straight-edge people and hippies. Tech workers and Marxists. There was always something new to do or learn. Indeed, I’ve been lucky: that’s been true my whole life.
Growing up in Queens, diversity wasn’t abstract—it was all around me. Within a short walking distance of the Roosevelt Avenue/74th Street subway station, more than 160 languages are spoken on a regular basis—it is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the world. As a middle-class Jew from New York, I am keenly aware of my own privilege and also of how that vibrant, multicultural upbringing has shaped my life. My experience of this diverse community underscored the importance of understanding another point of view—a perspective I bring with me to my research and to the classroom.
Even as what we today think of as Physics emerged from Natural Philosophy, it was an international subject, though of course by modern standards it was seriously lacking in diversity. While the academic physics community might have had a lead compared to large swaths of society in terms of international communication and engagement, it is clear that there still remains a long way to go before Physics can really be considered diverse.
In particular, I find the gender disparity in physics extremely troubling. Systemic and cultural issues abound and compound. The change has to be systemic and institutional, but individual male physicists have an important role to play in developing an environment that is welcoming to and supportive of under-represented groups. I look forward to landing at an institution with broad buy-in for trying to remedy this wild vestigial imbalance.
In the last few years, there has been extensive skepticism of the value of diversity in the physics classroom.See, for example, Jedidah C. Isler’s Op-Ed in response to skepticism of U.S. Supreme Court Justices, The ‘Benefits’ of Black Physics Students, New York Times 2015 Dec 17, A39. Science is a human activity, and has been politicized in the past—such as when teaching relativity at universities was prohibited in the Weimar Republic for being ``Jewish Physics’’—so actively embracing diversity is needed to ensure everybody learns and contributes as much as they can in a physics classroom or research setting. Wresting insights from Nature is hard enough—all willing hands are needed.
Moreover, students with different backgrounds can contribute unique points of view valuable to the communication of physics. For example, many romance languages distinguish between a permanent state of being (in Spanish: “ser”, which is conjugated “es”) and a transient state of being (“estar”, conjugated “está”) while English does not explicitly distinguish these two senses of “to be”. Working with a Spanish-speaking student, I learned this distinction is useful for differentiating the semantics of the equals sign in equations for acceleration often seen in classical mechanics
In “Acceleration is the rate of change of velocity” and “Mass times acceleration is the sum of the forces” ‘is’ operates in different senses. Acceleration is definitionally the derivative of velocity with respect to time: “ es ”. While the second equality is again always true, the forces one must account for vary from situation to situation and may themselves be transient, so the meaning is much closer to “ está ”. This is just one example where a different perspective can clarify a potentially confusing pedagogical point inside a physics classroom. I’m sure there are many other examples I have yet to encounter—but without a diverse community, who can say?
Certainly interacting with students from across the globe—both at Maryland and in Jülich—has given me direct exposure to people with different undergraduate preparations, with different sets of expertise, with whom you can assume different things. Working as a team mixes these competencies and makes discussion much more dynamic. Moreover, what helps one student may not another. My Math Methods students at UMD preferred a variety of different communication channels. Tailoring routes to learning and clarification to my students’ needs helped them do well and created a more accessible productive learning environment.
I am a scientist—I believe in reason, facts, argument, listening, and changing my mind when wrong. I believe in actively exposing myself to new and different experiences of the world will enrich my understanding. I believe in trying to understand another point of view, because it is crucial for learning something new. How else, then, but to live with conviction, and actively pursue such exposure? This is not something unique to physics—it is critical in every part of life.