Professor integrates gay culture into statistics course
Chloe Gotsis
Issue date: 4/4/07 Section: News
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Once considered unfit for the classroom, studies geared toward understanding homosexuality are slowly becoming commonplace in colleges across the country, and students -- gay, straight or otherwise -- are paying close attention.
Michele DiPietro, who has a doctorate degree in statistics and is the director of the Eberly Center at Carnegie Mellon University, created a class centered on investigating statistics about gay culture. According to DiPietro, these studies included biologist Alfred Kinsey's controversial estimate that 10 percent of the population is gay.
"As a gay man, I already had a lot of knowledge [of studies] that were being done in the U.S. on gays," DiPietro said. "So, I tried to come up with a class on that. I was inspired to kind of take my own challenge and make my own classes as diverse as possible."
DiPietro said statistics are not just "abstract things" because they can be applied to understand human concepts.
"It can tell us more things about societal issues," he said.
DiPietro said students who identify themselves as gay, straight and bisexual take his course, which also includes the study of bisexual and transgender people as well as those who question their sexuality. Students taking the class have gained confidence to accept their sexuality, he said.
"There was one guy who started the class as SQJD [what he called straight, questioning himself for Johnny Depp], and by the end of the class, he had come out as bisexual," DiPietro said. "He said that when he was coming out, the content helped him because he always thought, 'I'm not totally gay.'"
Social sciences major Ellen Parkhurst, the only openly lesbian student in DiPietro's class, said in an email that many of her classmates became more open-minded by taking the course.
"The statistics [were] very interesting, because I was able to read academic papers regarding the topic of homosexuality," Parkhurst said. "I enjoyed learning about the potential causes of homosexuality that people have studied."
Michele DiPietro, who has a doctorate degree in statistics and is the director of the Eberly Center at Carnegie Mellon University, created a class centered on investigating statistics about gay culture. According to DiPietro, these studies included biologist Alfred Kinsey's controversial estimate that 10 percent of the population is gay.
"As a gay man, I already had a lot of knowledge [of studies] that were being done in the U.S. on gays," DiPietro said. "So, I tried to come up with a class on that. I was inspired to kind of take my own challenge and make my own classes as diverse as possible."
DiPietro said statistics are not just "abstract things" because they can be applied to understand human concepts.
"It can tell us more things about societal issues," he said.
DiPietro said students who identify themselves as gay, straight and bisexual take his course, which also includes the study of bisexual and transgender people as well as those who question their sexuality. Students taking the class have gained confidence to accept their sexuality, he said.
"There was one guy who started the class as SQJD [what he called straight, questioning himself for Johnny Depp], and by the end of the class, he had come out as bisexual," DiPietro said. "He said that when he was coming out, the content helped him because he always thought, 'I'm not totally gay.'"
Social sciences major Ellen Parkhurst, the only openly lesbian student in DiPietro's class, said in an email that many of her classmates became more open-minded by taking the course.
"The statistics [were] very interesting, because I was able to read academic papers regarding the topic of homosexuality," Parkhurst said. "I enjoyed learning about the potential causes of homosexuality that people have studied."