Next Senate vice chair looks forward to new post
Eclectic professor Dorr specializes in education, media
By Jennifer K. Morita
Daily Bruin Staff
Next year's Academic Senate vice chairperson and School of Education Professor Aimee Dorr wears a Sesame Street watch on her left wrist.
Senate vice chair-elect and 1996-97 chair-to-be, Dorr was voted in by UCLA faculty in Academic Senate runoff elections that ended last week.
But her senate and committee work aren't the only things Dorr is involved in. The mother of two sons with two stepchildren as well, Dorr has worked extensively on child development.
"I've been always focused on children and teenagers and the ways in which they understand and make sense of media material and what we can do when we construct television or computer programs that will make it more likely that kids will understand it, learn from it and find it interesting," Dorr said.
After getting a degree in math from Stanford, she later decided to switch fields and went into child development, getting a doctorate in psychology.
"While I was at Stanford I became very interested in the ways children learned about the social cultural world around them and media, especially popular culture. It's one of the ways you get views of your society.," said Dorr, who grew up in Southern California.
"During part of the time I was at Stanford, I was subjected to a lot of discrimination as a woman," she said. "I was completely unprepared for it.
"Of course I have strengths and weaknesses. It was very hard to sort out what were my weaknesses and what were other people's prejudices," Dorr continued. "So I had a hard time for a while and wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do."
So she left Stanford for Harvard, where she continued her work with children and teens, examining media's role in their development and children's media literacy.
"After that, I had a career for sure," Dorr said.
But Southern California was calling Dorr home, and in 1978 she came back to teach at USC. Three years later she moved to UCLA, despite taking a cut in pay and losing the staff support USC provided.
"USC has some fabulous programs ... but the quality is more varied," she said. "UCLA tends to be generally excellent. I benefit from that because I can work with really great undergraduate students ... and it enriches me."
And Dorr said she also looks forward to her role in faculty government.
"The Academic Senate has an opportunity to provide input and one of the things I would like to promote is ways to attract and retain and support the very best faculty we can get," she said.
"Fair" is one word a colleague used to describe Dorr.
"In terms of integrity I cannot think of a person who I could recommend more for vice chair," said School of Education Professor Romeria Tidwell. "She's a very objective, very creative person.
"Her perspective on issues tends to be very broad and she's a very flexible person so she's able to take in different points of view and come to her own conclusion as to what she thinks is appropriate.
"She's definitely one of the leaders in the School of Education," Tidwell said.
Another colleague, who had hoped Dorr would take on the role of department chair in July, says Dorr is a groundbreaker in the School of Education.
"She was one of the pioneers in introducing technology to the School of Education," said Professor Sol Cohen.
Dorr, who has worked on the graduate council reviewing degree and program processes, may be working on undergraduate and graduate review processes as Academic Senate vice chair.
Although most of her work has been done at the graduate level, Dorr said she feels undergraduate programs are just as important.
"You can't have a university without a good undergraduate program," Dorr said. "I see undergraduate education and graduate education and faculty scholarship all belonging together and relating to each other and not separate."
By the same token, Dorr said that the strongest undergraduate education is going to be at a university that has good graduate and research programs.
"A research faculty is going to be very much up-to-date in their knowledge of their field, what's going on, who's doing what and what th e current issues are," Dorr said. "The pressure and the opportunity to be up-to-date are greater at a research university.
"If you have faculty who are transmitting that knowledge to students then it provides for undergraduate the most up-to-date and the richest view of what they're studying," Dorr said.
When she isn't at committee meetings, teaching, or working on research Dorr spends time with her family, goes to the symphony and reads.
When she was in New York she saw a play about Virginia Woolf that started her on a "Virginia Woolf jag" that included reading biographies and autobiographies on the author, reading "Orlando" and then watching the movie.
"I know," Dorr said. "It sounds eggheadish ... and it is."
Dorr also used to play in a women's soccer league as well as refereed a youth league her sons were in.
"She's a Renaissance person," Tidwell said. "She's able to do so many different things."
Cohen agrees.
"She's very well read in the classics and in contemporary literature," Cohen said. "In discussion one can get citations from Aimee Dorr from a broad range of sources."
And as Academic Senate vice chair?
"She'll do marvelously," Cohen said.