To the Editor:
We would like to take a few minutes and express our shock and distress with the Engineering department's decision not to recommend tenure for Professor Albert Henning.
For us students, it came as a great surprise that Professor Henning was not recommended. In our time at Dartmouth, Professor Henning has been one of the best teachers we have had the privilege of studying under. Not only did he devote his time at any hour of the day to helping students in the laboratory or his office, but he also held five-hour review sessions before his exams; but most importantly, Professor Henning taught well.
Engineering Sciences 22 (Systems) is known to be one of the harder undergraduate classes in the Thayer School. Professor Henning's careful teaching made that class not only understandable, but interesting -- it was a class worth working hard for. Unlike many professors we have had, Professor Henning did not blow the students away and leave us to catch up to him; he was always willing to explain the difficult and technical material several times and from different perspectives until we understood the principles. Professor Henning is the type of man who earns respect quickly from his students. Learning from him was a pleasure.
In addition, ENGS 65 (Science and Technology of Micromachines) is one of a handful of classes in the country on micro-electrical-mechanical systems. Unlike the other programs at MIT, Stanford, etc., this class actually allows the students to design a device and have it fabricated commercially. Whether the class will exist any more if Professor Henning leaves is questionable, because it was very much a personal project of his. Students of ENGS 65 will attest to the effort put forth by Professor Henning for this class. As there is no textbook available on the subject, all of the lectures, handouts and labs were prepared essentially from scratch.
For present and future students, the loss of Professor Henning from the faculty equates to a substantial and noticeable loss in our educational experiences at Dartmouth College. We understand that there are several factors contributing to a professor's tenure, but when one of the students' most respected teachers and mentors in the Thayer School is denied tenure, we wonder: how highly is undergraduate teaching performance really considered in the tenure process?
