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Editorial
Last month, at the request of the Faculty Chair and others, we made selected areas of the FNL Website, normally limited to the MIT community, available to the public. This was in response to the extraordinary interest by both the popular press and other schools to "A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT" and to the MIT administration’s rapid, unequivocal response to it. We think that making the report widely available, in all its detail and nuance, enhanced the level of public discussion.
We did not have a counter on the Website for the first week following release of the report. (We don’t generally have much need for one.) We did get one in place as soon as we had a chance. We estimate, with a conservative extrapolation of the curve to its origin, that the Faculty Newsletter Website containing the report received more than 100,000 "hits" in the week following publication of the Web address (URL) in The New York Times. Now, more than a month later, the Newsletter site containing the Report still receives several hundred hits per day.
Credit for the utilization of the resources of the Faculty Newsletter to expedite the electronic (as well as paper) release of the Report goes to a host of people, in addition to the Newsletter staff. The chair of the faculty, Lotte Bailyn, along with members of the Committee who wrote the report (and in particular Professor Nancy Hopkins) worked closely with us in preparing and modifying the Web version. Particular thanks go to Ms. Anna Frazer, staff associate in the President's office, who kept us up to date on last minute changes and modifications.
Thanks also needs to go to MIT Mail Services and its director, Penny Guyer, (and Administrative Assistant Deborah Puleo) who made it possible for the Newsletter to be labeled and mailed on virtually a moment's notice, thus providing the faculty with a hard copy of the report as soon as possible. (No small thanks as well go to the Newsletter's printing house, Eagle Graphics, for their extraordinary turnaround time.)
Responses to the Report and MIT’s reply, almost universally favorable, have come from as near as Harvard and as far as Japan. Closer to home, we have the experience of one MIT class who incorporated it into their coursework. The authors are students in the class.
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