Ahead of the Curve

Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics Howard Georgi ’67 spent a February weekend peering into a Hawaiian sunset with his freshman-year roommates.

For the past eight years, he and his friends have traversed the globe in search of the green flash, an atmospheric phenomenon that appears for a fraction of a second. He can count on his hands the number of glimpses he’s had.

But back at Harvard, he has been on another search. For the past decade—before President Lawrence H. Summers’ comments rocked the academic world—he’s been looking for women in the sciences.

The 58 year-old Georgi, a bearded, august professor, might seem like an unlikely feminist. But if anyone has the heft to make change, he does. The physicist learned his scientific ABCs at the College from Nobel Prize-winner Julian Schwinger, won renown in the lab, and eventually assumed the chairmanship of Harvard’s physics department.

In his four years as chair, he brought an unprecedented number of women faculty to the department and helped increase the proportion of female undergraduates to 40 percent, a number that hasn’t been matched since. Since stepping down and becoming a House Master, he has transformed Leverett into Harvard’s undergraduate physics hotspot.

And he hasn’t stayed put in the aftermath of the Summers frenzy. Just one day after the story broke, Georgi sent an e-mail to all physics concentrators, deeming any discussion of innate differences unfruitful. And his efforts haven’t stopped.

PROBLEM SET

As it nears 11 p.m., Leverett dining hall buzzes with chatter about electromagneticism and gravity. At the center is Georgi. Three students—just a handful of the many who will seek his signature or advice during his office hours—tip-toe in a line to his side, problem-sets in hand. They’re confused about a charge. Georgi flattens his hands to illustrate the problem, but then tells them to wait for more answers in lecture the next morning.

But sometimes, the next morning never comes—especially when the problem isn’t just one of seven on a p-set, but instead the larger barriers to bringing women to the physics department.

When Georgi first came to the College as an undergrad, the issue wasn’t even on the radar screen. Harvard was for men and Radcliffe for women, and though they shared classrooms and labs, men outnumbered women four to one.

It wasn’t until a quarter of a century had passed, after grad school at Yale and a rise to the chair of Harvard’s physics department, that he would realize that women needed some help. And the problem wasn’t that they couldn’t do their homework. “What caught me were statistics that our female undergrads were miserable,” he says. The few women in physics classes who “hadn’t yet been driven away” were being ignored. Women were left out of study groups, and there weren’t any tenured females.

So he started remaking the system. At the graduate level, he made the admissions review more holistic, emphasizing recommendations and grades and downplaying GREs, where women tend to get lower scores than their male counterparts. “There are lots of ways in which we have too narrow a view of what a physicist needs to look like,” Georgi says.

And for undergrads—his main focus—he tweaked the concentration requirements. “Here, you can decide your sophomore year that you want to get physics and get a degree,” Professor of Physics Melissa E.B. Franklin says. “That makes it better for women and minorities because there’s not always that same background in math.”

During his tenure as chair, he not only increased the proportion of female undergraduates in the department, but also brought Franklin to tenure as the university’s first female physics professor.

“He sees all these really, really smart women, and he wants to get them and keep them in physics,” says Franklin, who first came to Harvard as a junior fellow selected by Georgi and others. Though just six women teach in the physics department, that’s light years ahead of other departments at other schools, she says.

Georgi’s pet project, though, was bringing together a group of professors to take on additional advising duties, creating a more supportive system for the undergraduates he cared so much about. And he succeeded because he’s not afraid of making people angry. “He doesn’t have a lot of tact, so if he doesn’t think someone is smart, he’ll just say it,” Franklin says.

Although Georgi is no longer head of the department, he still plays ambassador to physics buffs. Freshmen in his Physics 15b and 16 classes turn to him instead of their academic advisers. As Head Tutor, he’s turned Leverett House into the de facto center for physics outside of Jefferson Hall. Every Wednesday, students converge on the dining hall for Physics Night, seeking help from each other and the man himself.

LOOKING AHEAD

It’s 11 a.m., and the Physics 15b lecture is winding down. In last night’s outfit, Georgi leans against the wall, waiting. Science Center D is silent as students send in their answers to a multiple choice question via remote controls. The answers tally up on screen. “Did that make sense?” he asks. “You’re quiet!” They quickly murmur perfunctory yeses.

That same kind of easy stagnation has returned to the physics department now that he’s left the chairmanship. The changes he made, like the group of faculty he got to take on extra advising duties, are being “dismantled,” he says, and Franklin agrees that the department isn’t as aware of the need to bring in women. “He’s no longer chair of the graduate admissions committee, and other people aren’t so clear on this,” Franklin says.

But there’s still hope that the backsliding in physics could stop. Adding to a list of past leadership positions of committees that work on the issue across departments and universities, he’s now co-chairing Harvard’s Undergraduate Working Group of the Task Force on Women in Science. The group of male and female students, drawn from chemistry to computer science, met for the first time on Tuesday. The Working Group will submit proposals by the end of May, says Mariangela Lisanti ’05, co-chair of the Task Force and president of Women in Science at Harvard-Radcliffe (WISHR). Georgi wants to concentrate on upping student advising resources, strengthening training for teaching fellows and faculty and, most importantly, increasing opportunities for undergraduate research.

He and the committee have a long list of plans, and it’s hard to tell how many they’ll be able to implement—and if the effects will last any longer than the green flash.