Pre-Frosh Get Peek At Task Force Plan

A faculty task force created in the wake of University President Lawrence H. Summers’ controversial remarks on women in science will recommend that Harvard substantially increase the breadth of research opportunities available to undergraduates, Summers told incoming members of the Class of 2009 Friday afternoon.

The task force’s recommendations “are going to assure that we have many many more undergraduate research opportunities than ever before,” Summers said in remarks to a standing-room-only Science Center audience of high school students who have been admitted to the College.

Summers said the University would provide assistance to undergrads who want to stay in Cambridge over the summer and work on collaborative projects with faculty members. His spokesman, John Longbrake, declined to provide further details on the plan yesterday.

The task force was formed in February to address the under-representation of women in science and engineering and to “find effective ways to encourage Harvard undergraduate women to pursue such careers,” the University announced at the time. The task force’s chair, Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences Barbara J. Grosz, said yesterday that “I can’t tell you anything about the task force until our recommendations come out.” Other professors on Grosz’s task force did not return requests for comment.

A second task force was also formed in February to promote gender diversity among the University’s faculty and administrative ranks.

The University’s February press release stated that “the task forces are expected to complete their work by May 1, 2005, so that recommended measures may be implemented by the beginning of the next academic year.” The two task forces’ spokeswoman, Whitney Espich, said yesterday that both will issue their final reports later this month.

The Grosz task force’s report will in part reflect the recommendations of a faculty-student working group led by Professor of Physics Melissa E. B. Franklin, Leverett House Master Howard Georgi ’67, and Mariangela Lisanti ’05, a Lowell House physics concentrator who is president of Women in Science at Harvard-Radcliffe.

“I can’t comment on the specifics of proposals,” Lisanti said yesterday. But she said the working group “wanted to have a central infrastructure in place to help students get involved in research, working in labs, and having really strong mentorship opportunities with professors on campus.”

According to a 2001 report from the National Council for Research on Women, female undergrads disproportionately abandon plans to major in the sciences during their freshman year, but retention rates are higher for women who have strong relationships with faculty mentors and who participate in hands-on research.

The initiative being drafted by task force members will affect male undergrads as well. “All the recommendations that are going to come out are going to apply to both women and men,” Lisanti said.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.