Harvard Women

Many times in the last few years, women at this University have had occasion to wonder whether the Administration and Faculty took a serious view of their discontent. Harvard has been reluctant to disclose the details of its affirmative action plan filed with HEW, has moved very slowly in encouraging the development of day care facilities, and has been eager to preserve the admissions quota on female undergraduates even as Radcliffe merges into the University. Such policies have often seemed to betray an indifference to the urgency of improving women's status in the academic world.

It is therefore most encouraging to read the report issued by the Faculty Committee on the Status of Women, a study chaired by Professors Caroline Bynum and Michael Walzer. The report is the first occasion on which the Faculty has addressed itself to the equity of its de facto exclusion of women from membership and its prohibition of part time graduate study. We wholeheartedly endorse the main recommendation of the report, that the Faculty strive to hire more women in its tenured and non-tenured ranks. The goal of filling 9.6 per cent of tenured positions, and 19 per cent of non-tenured positions with women, is modest, reasonable, and a target which should be pursued with good faith and speed. It is equally important to have a Standing Committee that can assist departments in bringing more women onto the Faculty and can report on what progress has been made. The other major proposal is that the Faculty establish part-time professorships and allow part-time graduate study. These measures are essential to allow women scholars to remain active professionally and intellectually during child-bearing years. Again we hope that the Faculty will approve these proposals unanimously.

The Faculty vote today is extremely important, both to establish Harvard's symbolic commitment to the goal of equal opportunity for women, and to start in motion, in time for 1972 academic appointments, the procedures that will encourage the appointment of women. However, the major work outlined by the report cannot be accomplished by a vote. Increasing women's participation in Arts and Sciences will require the continued commitment of department chairmen and the Dean of the Faculty. It requires that faculty members who still maybe somewhat ambivalent about demands for more women demonstrate a willingness to examine their own attitudes, a willingness perhaps to compromise. It will eventually require that President-designate Bok use the dignity and influence of his office to move the University forward in other areas such as day care, studies of women's status in administration and library work, and in reconsidering the admissions quota on undergraduate women. It would do credit to the beginning of a new presidential administration at Harvard to begin to establish equal opportunity for all scholars.