Chemists faculty

During the course of his academic career, Helferich occupied many important offices. In the academic year 1951-1952, he was Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, and, in the academic year 1954-1955, Vice-Chancellor of the Rhenish Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn. From 1953-1955, he was a member of the council of the Gesell-schaft Deutscher Chemiker, and was president of this society from 1956 to 1957. He made a major contribution to the rapid restoration of the scientific and personal links with foreign chemists that had been broken by the war. 

Born in Georgia in 1867, Herty was the son of a pharmacist and originally planned to enter his father s profession. After graduating from the University of Georgia with a Ph.B. in 1886, however, he decided to undertake advanced study in chemistry under Ira Remsen at The Johns Hopkins University. Herty received his Ph.D. from Hopkins in 1890, and, after a year at the Georgia State Experiment Station, joined the faculty of the University of Georgia, where he remained for the next decade. During that period he took a leave of absence to pursue postdoctoral work at the universities of Berlin and Zurich. While in Berlin, he attended the lectures of the noted synthetic dye chemist Otto Witt. 

A Badger Chemist Genealogy The Faculty at the University of Wisconsin. (With Alan J. Rocke). J. Chem. Educ., 56,93-5 (1979). 

One way of dealing with the Berlin Philosophical Faculty s point of view was to develop a distinction between "pure" and "applied" science so as to distinguish general chemistry from its particular uses in pharmacy, agriculture, manufactures, brewing, and wine making. This distinction allowed chemists to teach as academicians in the philosophical tradition but to continue to advise municipal committees on sanitation measures and perform assays for local industries. 

It is important to note that while the chemical physics part of natural philosophy often was taught by chemists, the mathematical physics part of natural philosophy frequently was pursued by mathematicians in the nineteenth century as a humanistic discipline exercising the faculty of reason and nurturing aesthetic sensibility.65 Indeed, Kuhn has argued that the disciplinary formation of modem physics along the lines of the early twentieth-century "physics" curriculum was due, in part, to mathematicians losing interest in applied math-... 

In fact, "physical chemistry" was a phrase much in use before 1887,4 and as noted in chapter 2, it sometimes was a subject of study, by that very name, among nineteenth-century chemists.5 An independent chair of physical chemistry was created for Kopp at Heidelberg in 1863, and a section for physical chemistry was established in the physical-mathematical faculty at the University of Kharkow in 1864. The first instructional laboratory at a German university was not Ostwald s but his predecessor s at Leipzig, Gustav Wiedemann, whose physical chemistry laboratory was authorized in 1871 to provide a strong basis for the development of a "theoretical chemistry."6... 

As we saw in chapter 2, allusions to Newton by chemists in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century can be understood as a means of legitimation for apron-coated chemists among the black-gowned philosophers of the university. It was no small achievement for chemists to establish a university identity in the philosophical faculties outside the professional schools of pharmacy and medicine. The chemist s laboratory was, after all, a far more appalling intrusion into academic halls than Robert Boyle s air pump or the Abbe Nollet s batteries of Leyden jars. 

He found the method for the determination of the composition of unstable coordination compounds formed in solution in 1921 [1], which was later proposed by P. Job [2] and is known as the continuous variation method or Job s method. Shibata s discovery of the method was much prior than that of Job, but it was not well recognized by chemists around the world, because his report was written in Japanese. He was the Dean of the Faculty of Science of Nagoya University, and then, the President of the Tokyo Metropolitan University. He was appointed to be the President of Japan Academy. 

White chemists E. P. Kohler of Harvard and Ernst Spaeth of the University of Vietma also nurtured Julian s career at critical times. Blanchard and DePauw President G. Bromley Oxnam recommended Julian s appointment to the faculty. However, the Board of Trustees rejected his appointment. Like many white universities of the time, DePauw was not ready for a black professor. (Some thirty years later, Julian was elected to the Board.) According to Borman (1993), the University of Mirmesota declined to appoint Julian as well. Consequently, Julian applied for and was offered a position as a researcher at the Institute of Paper Chemistry (IPC) in Appleton, Wisconsin. This failed to materialize as well because IPC executives discovered an Appleton statute that forbade housing of a Negro overnight (Borman, 1993). 

Of the 1,638 Ph.D. chemists employed by the Top 50 chemistry departments in 2001, Nelson et al. (2001) report that only 18 or a mere 1.1% were African Americans. The fact that only one African American Ph.D. chemist was appointed as an assistant professor in a tenure-track position at one of the nation s top 50 chemistry departments in 2000 provides further evidence that African Americans continue to be virtually absent from these faculties (Bhattachaqee, 2003). In a report released by Dartmouth College (2003), a key finding was that faculty diversity tends to lag well behind student diversity. 

Feelings of isolation were common among interviewees at both historically black colleges and universities and historically white colleges and universities. In instances where the chemists were the only persons of color in the department or perhaps the first ones ever appointed to a faculty position in chemistry, many became discouraged and sometimes very depressed. Benjamin (1991) posits that the social isolation faced by many upwardly mobile African Americans often leads to stress, which can manifest itself in physiological disorders, such as hypertension, behavioral disorders, and even suicide. One Cohort V interviewee offered the following comments ... 

The fact that I am the only African American at a senior rank is due to the way the company recmits. We go to, for example, Harvard and Cal Tech. We are in contact with faculty members there. .. I don t think we make an overt effort to develop networks which would identify African American Ph.D. chemists and recmit them. 

Except for interviewees employed at historically white colleges and universities, most interviewees were more satisfied with their influence on departmental rather than institutional policies. Industrial chemists expressed the lowest level of satisfaction in their ability to influence either institutional or departmental policies. One Cohort I interviewee from an historically black college explained that a simple departmental policy decision changed the dynamics of student/faculty interaction ... 

One Cohort IV interviewee commented I have seen the research at major research universities... A lot of the faculty is on legacy and not substance. If you are not at one of these places, you must have advocates. A Cohort IV interviewee at a predominantly white university expressed this concern My inability to network with white chemists continues to be a major problem in developing collaborations and getting my research funded. 

Based on interviews with chemists in historically black colleges and universities, sexism is not limited to predominantly white campuses. Sexism is an issue for predominantly black institutions, even among the faculty, as reflected in the cormnents of a Cohort III female interviewee ... 

Write Like a Chemist is designed to be used as a textbook in upper division and graduate-level university chemistry classes and as a resource hook by chemistry students, postdocs, faculty, and other professionals who want to perfect their chemistry-specihc writing skills. To this end. Write Like a Chemist focuses on four types of writing ... 

We are particularly indebted to chemistry faculty (and their students) who piloted drafts of Write Like a Chemist at their home institutions during 2004-2006 (if faculty affiliations have changed, we note the pilot institution in parentheses) ... 

We also thank faculty who served as external evaluators for the Write Like a Chemist project ... 

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