Denice Denton grew up in the Houston area, went to MIT to study engineering, won a number of research awards and eventually signed on in 1987 as a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, where she was the only female faculty member in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the time. She continued to excel at Wisconsin and by 1996, Denton was hired at the age of 37 as the first female engineering dean at a major US research university in the U.S. (the University of Washington’s College of Engineering).
Thus, it was not particularly surprising that Denton was named as chancellor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2004, the youngest chancellor in the UC system. Less than two years later, an embattled Denton went on medical leave and checked herself into the Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital at the University of California at San Francisco. On June 24, 2006, after checking out of the hospital, Denton committed suicide by leaping from a high-rise apartment building in San Francisco.
This Paul Fain/Arts & Letters Daily article covers the final few weeks of Denton’s life, and it’s fascinating look into the intersection of depression, political correctness, anti-political correctness, and the byzantine world of academic politics. Definitely not a life for the faint-hearted.