An anonymous reader has alerted me to the home page of Dr. Y. S. Kim, a physics professor at the University of Maryland. If you browse through the entire site, you will see that Dr. Kim has hero-worship for Einstein, Dirac, and Feynman. You will see many pictures of him with other well-known physicists. You can learn about physics and physics history on his site.
But you only have to go to the home page to see cheesecake and beefcake.
The caption "I enjoy mixing up with students wherever I go. Can you tell where this photo was produced?" appears underneath a photo of the esteemed Dr. Kim on a sandy beach with three women and two men in bathing suits, and another young man in shorts and a t-shirt. The men and women in bathing suits are arrayed around Dr. Kim, along with a person dressed up in a costume that looks as if it were made of seaweed.
I don't know who the people are in this photo, whether they are really students of his, or people he met on the beach, or friends and family. I do know that a picture like this should not be on the personal home page of a physics professor. Especially not next to text telling us that one of Dr. Kim's extracurricular activities is "making the webpages more attractive to visitors".
If the people in the photo are indeed students of Dr. Kim's, then he is just a bit too friendly with his students for my taste. No professor should be cavorting on the beach with students in bathing suits. Did he check with the students before putting their picture on the web?
This picture reminds me of the time in my physiology course when, in the midst of a set of dreary slides, there suddenly appeared a photo of an attractive young woman in a bathing suit on the deck of a boat. The professor told us, "I thought we could all use something to lighten up this lecture. This is my daughter on my boat." Then he went back to lecturing about physiology. When I think about it, I still can't believe it happened - how could it be that in the late 1980's, professors were still inserting pictures of scantily-clad women into their slide shows? How could a father exploit his own daughter in this way? I grieve for the poor young woman whose father used her as an object of titillation for his students.
But here we are twenty years later, and there are still professors who think it's just dandy to put pictures of scantily-clad men and women on their web page.
And please don't tell me that it's a problem of cultural communication. Dr. Kim has lived in this country since he finished high school, so he's had some time to learn about norms of behavior for U.S. professors.
If you have something you'd like to say to Dr. Kim about his home page, why not email him and let him know? He can be reached at yskim@umd.edu.
Or maybe you'd like to chat with his department chair about Dr. Kim's web page. Dr. Jordan A. Goodman can be reached at goodman@umdgrb.umd.edu.
UMD's physics department runs an outreach program for 8th grade girls entitled "Summer Girls Program". If they succeed in recruiting some of these young girls to their physics program, I hope they won't eventually find themselves as window-dressing on some professor's web page.
5:36:19 PM 
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