Yale Union Reports On Diversity In Ivies

Yale Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) released a report this Tuesday stating that discrimination has kept women and minorities out of high-level positions in Ivy League schools, and specifically identifying University President Lawrence H. Summers’ “combative tenure” as one issue that has furthered such discrimination.

According to GESO—which failed in its attempts to organize graduate student unions at Yale last year—the solution to the problem of shuffling women and minorities into non-tenure track positions lies primarily in forming stronger unions of graduate students and professors.

The report, entitled “The (Un) Changing Face of the Ivy League,” analyzes trends in diversity among staff at all eight Ivy League universities 1993 to 2003, using statistics from the U.S. Department of Education.

Shana L. Redmond, a graduate student in African-American and American Studies at Yale and an author of the report, said that GESO’s Accessibility and Diversity committee began researching this report last year, to follow up on complaints

graduate students had voiced about discrimination in hiring and in academia more generally.

According to the study, women and minorities are being hired disproportionately as lecturers, associate professors, or other “non-ladder” positions, while the percentage of minority tenured faculty, on average, has increased by one percentage point in a decade.

This gives the illusion of diversity, while in fact maintaining “bastions of inequality,” the report said.

“The universities have thus created a two-tiered system: one tier, overwhelmingly white and disproportionately male, is characterized by secure, well-compensated, higher status tenured and tenure-track positions; the other is the world of insecure, poorly-paid, part-time and impermanent jobs, to which women and people of color have been largely relegated,” the report said.

The report repeatedly singled out Summers among other Ivy League presidents for maintaining “elitism,” and criticized him for eliminating the position of Associate Dean for Affirmative Action in 2002.

But Summers’ spokeswoman Lucie McNeil said yesterday that the decision to eliminate that administrative post occurred before Summers began his tenure.

The recent firestorm surrounding Summers’ remarks on women in science was cited as evidence of Summers’ discriminatory practices.

“What President Summers failed to acknowledge is that current standards for academic promotion—standards for parental leave, time to degree, tenure timeline, employment flexibility and child care options—are no more intrinsic or eternal than was the principle of single-sex education 30 years ago,” the report stated.

And two weeks ago, GESO members had protested Yale president Richard Levin’s decision to remain silent about Summers’ remarks.

But Redmond was careful to say that despite the attacks on Summers, she hoped the GESO report would spark all Ivy League presidents toward action.

“Our whole point is that all the presidents are culpable in this situation... [Summers] just happens to be in the spotlight right now,” Redmond said. “We’re just waiting on that one to actually step out and do the right thing.”

Summers was to receive a copy of the study at his door on Tuesday, Redmond said.

Summers, through McNeil, declined to comment on the report yesterday.

According to Redmond, graduate student unionization is the first step toward increasing faculty diversity, in order to “get the ball rolling.”

After that, the report prescribed “bargaining collectively” among professors, and not just student teachers.

The report claimed that women and minorities are underpaid, despite holding the same degrees as their white male counterparts.

“Unless universities are compelled fundamentally to restructure certain features of access,. employment and promotion, no amount of oversight or diversity initiatives will suffice,” the report said.

But many are not convinced that unionization is the solution.

Ascherman Professor of Economics Richard B. Freeman, an organizer of the National Bureau of Economics Research (NBER) conference where Summers made his now-famous remarks, expressed doubt that such a plan could work at large universities like Harvard or Yale.

“Initially as an economist, I’m dubious,” Freeman said, though he added that he thought unionization could be “feasible” under certain circumstances.

But he said that while unions were effective at bargaining for health care and other benefits, he did not see how GESO proposed to make the jump from graduate student unions to faculty diversity.

“If we’re really talking faculty, it’s hard to see how the graduate student union affects the faculty,” he said.