To Date, No Women Among 13 New Senior Profs

Despite the 32 offers of tenure Harvard made this year—13 of which have been accepted to date—no female professors accepted senior faculty positions this year.

“It is going to be a smaller group of women within the people who have been offered tenure,” Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby said in an interview last week. “[But] we have had stronger and weaker years in recruitment of women at all levels of the Faculty.”

This year’s results come despite Kirby’s stated emphasis on hiring more female faculty. The list does reflect progress towards his goal of interdisciplinary hires and internal promotions.

The University made 32 offers of tenure during the 2003-2004 academic year. Thirteen of these offers have been accepted, six were refused and 13 are outstanding.

So far, the yield is 68.4 percent, while at this time last year, when 32 offers had also been made, the yield was 75 percent.

But Kirby said that he expects this yield to rise as a new batch of offers are about to be made.

“There are some people who are just about to receive their offers,” he said.

HIRING WOMEN

Hiring more women, particularly for junior faculty positions, has been one of Kirby’s goals as dean.

Kirby wrote in this year’s annual letter to the Faculty that he hopes that FAS will consider how it can reform environments within departments to make them more favorable to women.

He expressed concern over the fact that women “represent just 35 percent of the non-tenured ranks” and wrote that he “intend[ed] to work intensively on this issue in the year ahead.”

Kirby also encouraged job search committees to pay particular attention to women candidates.

Last year, nine of the 21 new tenured appointments were women. Kirby offered no explanation for the failure to attract any women senior professors thus far.

This year several females were appointed to junior faculty positions. Thirty-seven percent of junior offers made were to women, according to Associate Dean for Faculty Development Laura G. Fisher.

But despite this year’s junior appointments, in February, Dean for the Humanities Maria M. Tatar expressed concern over a downward trend in hiring female junior faculty in the humanities.

At the time she said that one possible explanation was that more women Faculty members are being promoted to senior Faculty positions from within departments.

A lack of female senior Faculty members within a department can pose problems when recruiting women to fill junior Faculty positions, Nancy Tobin ’49, research chair for the Committee for the Equality of Women at Harvard (CEWH), told The Crimson in February. CEWH was founded by Radcliffe alums in 1988.

BRIDGING DIVIDES

Continuing a recent trend, many of this year’s faculty hires are interdisciplinary researchers.

David N. Rodowick, who helped develop film studies programs at three other universities, including Yale and King’s College, London, will become the second full professor of film studies in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) this fall.

Rodowick has big plans for Harvard’s film studies program, including a new course which would combine film and philosophy.

Next year, he will be teaching VES 170a, “Introduction to Visual Studies and Film Analysis;” VES 191, “From Cinematic to Digital Culture;” and VES 192r, “Philosophy and Film.”

The “Philosophy and Film” class is particularly in line with Rodowick’s research interests.

Having trained as a philosopher, Rodowick said he studies “the history of film theory and aesthetic thought about film in relationship to philosophies about art.”

Formerly a practicing artist, Rodowick said he is particularly excited about working in the studio arts environment of VES. He said he believes that he can help to bridge the divide between studio work and theory in the study of art.

“Film studies is going to be a way of branching out in a broad and deep way to the undergraduate community and bringing new people into VES,” he said. “I love preaching to the church of cinema.”

Wendy B. Mendes, the former Miss California who will be joining the psychology department from the University of California at San Francisco, also has a dual focus.

Mendes’s research combines social psychology with psychophysiology. For instance, she has examined how people’s bodies react when they encounter people of other ethnicities or during particularly stressful interactions.

Mendes said that her particular interdisciplinary approach may be unique among the members of Harvard’s psychology department.

“There is a lot of emphasis on more interdisciplinary training...because it really brings a unique perspective to our research questions,” she said. “I think I might be one of the first who bridges the specific areas that I do.”

In the fall, Mendes, who also has a Master’s degree in statistics, plans to teach an advanced research methods course that will help seniors learn how to analyze data for their theses.

THROUGH THE RANKS

This year, the faculty hiring process reflected increased attention to assistant and associate professors, and Kirby wrote that this increased support for junior faculty members will continue next year.

The attention was reflected in the fact that three of the professors starting senior positions in the fall were promoted from within their departments in addition to the five junior faculty members promoted last year.

Kirby said new policies were partly behind the shift.

“This year the new appointments procedures came into effect, which meant even greater scrutiny and support than in the past in the hiring of assistant professors,” Kirby wrote in an e-mail.

In October, Kirby announced that all junior faculty members will now receive written assessments from their departments at the beginning of their third year. These assessments give junior faculty members a better indication of their prospects for receiving tenure at a major research university.

In addition, the “blind” letters that Harvard sends to solicit information about a list of potential hires now explicitly mark any Harvard junior professor under consideration. To increase a junior faculty member’s prospects, the letters may including some of his or her work for review.

Thirty new junior faculty members will be starting positions on July 1.

This hiring is part of Kirby’s plan to expand the size of the Faculty of 656 professors to 700 professors or more.

“A greater percentage of searches will be at the assistant and associate professor level, and we will encourage departments to provide opportunities for mentoring and career development, and other forms of support so that our new colleagues may become strong candidates for tenure,” Kirby wrote in an e-mail.

In addition to expressing his support for junior faculty, Kirby said that he is dedicated to keeping his focus on hiring.

“This as every year we emphasize the importance of identifying and recruiting a diverse faculty,” he wrote. “We aim every year to hire the most outstanding faculty at every rank, and to ensure that searches are broad and thorough.”

—Staff writer Sara E. Polsky can be reached at polsky@fas.harvard.edu.