Diversity Office Takes First Steps

One year after outgoing University President Lawrence H. Summers promised $50 million to initiatives for the University’s women and minorities, Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity Evelynn M. Hammonds will update the University on June 12 with a report detailing the efforts of her office.

It will contain analyses of the composition of Harvard’s faculty, new childcare guidelines, and data from surveys of junior professors—all significant recommendations of the two faculty task forces created in the wake of Summers’ Jan. 2005 remarks on women in science, which produced pages of proposals to address the dearth of women and minorities in the sciences in two reports released last May.

But some professors who have worked on the committees say the task of transforming an institution still reverberating with the aftershocks of Summers’ remarks and resignation awaits a leadership committed to change—not just a hefty check.

“As long as we don’t know who the next president will be and what stance the leader will have, it’s a little hard to talk about progress. You really need a leadership that takes ownership of the issue,” says Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies Michele Lamont.

“Social engineering is a complex thing and it doesn’t happen overnight,” she says. “You cannot expect this committee to produce deliverables.”

THE PRICE IS RIGHT?

Last spring, professors and administrators said Summers’ decision to give $50 million over 10 years symbolized his commitment to the work of the two task forces on female faculty.

“He responded to the reports, which he received on May 16, with a decision to commit that amount of money as a kind of indication of sincerity and good intentions,” Dean of the Radcliffe Institute Drew Gilpin Faust told The Crimson at the time.

But one year later, it appears that relatively little of the $50 million has been spent.

According to Hammonds, money from the $50 million allocation has so far gone to data collection and analysis, the newly-established 120-person Harvard College Program for Research in Science and Engineering (PRISE), and daycare stipends for faculty children.

According to PRISE director Gregory A. Llacer, the undergraduate summer research program will cost roughly $1 million over the course of several years. The cost of administering the survey of tenure-track faculty comes to a total of $20,000, with optional questions contributing expenses of $1,500 for 10 close-ended questions and $500 for five open-ended questions, says a posting on the website of the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE), which was responsible for administering the questionnaire. Even factoring in the money allocated to childcare and the salaries and operational costs associated with Hammonds’ office, it seems unlikely that the final sum approaches one tenth of the total.

There is little question that the money can be spent, professor’s say. According to Higginson Professor of History and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Philip A. Kuhn, a department must have $4 million in the bank for every endowed senior professorship of the kind the fund hopes to establish to hire women and minority faculty.

“I hope that $50 million is only a beginning for the long run,” Dean of the Divinity School William A. Graham, who served on the original task force and, as dean, has been in contact with Hammonds’ office throughout the year, writes in an e-mail.

Hammonds says she anticipates additional spending on mentorship programs and another, more detailed, survey to be conducted this year.

“These are just the initial steps,” she writes in an e-mail.

LAYING THE GROUNDWORK

But professors say money spent may not be the best way to measure the changes that are taking place.

Instead, Harvard faces the less expensive—but more time-consuming—task of developing a culture that focuses on diversity in the tenure process and mentorship opportunities for female faculty members.

“Harvard is drastically behind a lot of other institutions. The danger, I think, is, because the problem is deep and historical, hiring five more senior people in any of the schools won’t really help,” says Lamont, who serves on the committee within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences that is coordinating efforts with the Office of Faculty Development and Diversity. “It’s really a question, I think, of the creation of...the infrastructure that will ensure greater [equality]. And that’s not necessarily flashy work.”

The task force reports recommended that the new senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity be permitted to review appointment files and participate in tenure ad hoc committee meetings, ensuring University attention to women’s issues,

This year, Hammonds reviewed the files of nearly 400 appointments and served on over 40 ad hoc committees, according to Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values Jane J. Mansbridge.

“That was incredibly time consuming but you have do it in order to get a sense of where the [change can be made],” says Mansbridge, who consulted with Hammonds about her office’s initiatives as a representative of the Kennedy School of Government.

FAMILY MATTERS

The forthcoming report will detail efforts to standardize the University’s accommodation of “the demands of work and family,” by creating new parental leave guidelines and requiring that each school have a written policy, Hammonds says.

According to Mansbridge, the new policy automatically grants a semester of paid teaching relief to new parents, responding to concerns that childcare policies were not well-publicized or automatically applied, she adds.

Each school may tailor these minimum guidelines to satisfy its needs. Mansbridge, who served on the Task Force on Women Faculty last year, said that the Task Force found it difficult to set central policy.

“I might have been hoping for more centralized control, but I wasn’t aware of how deeply decentralized the University is,” Mansbridge says.

The committee created an electronic consortium of universities in the Boston area to facilitate spousal hiring in response to data showing that women have a harder time finding new jobs when families relocate.

The consortium is the first of its kind in the area and is modelled off of arrangements already in existence in California.

The report also sets aside family funds for faculty and students engaged in research-related travel and increases scholarships and spots at Harvard-affiliated daycare centers.

But professors say that such measures are still largely symbolic.

“You know this is kind of a drop in the bucket,” says Mansbridge of the childcare initiative. “You could spend a lot of money trying to compensate parents for the time and money they spend raising children, so as to begin to level the playing field between them and the childless. This isn’t anything like solving the problem, but it’s an increase.”

Though it has not received final approval yet, Mansbridge says the office of diversity and development is also vying for space to build a new day-care center on the University’s Allston campus.

STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT

The Office of Faculty Development and Diversity collected demographic data that compares Harvard’s schools to each other and the University overall to peer institutions, investigating questions such as the number of tenure offers made to males and females and the time it takes until promotion.

In addition, the office used the 50-item survey of junior faculty developed by COACHE that has been used at other universities, like Dartmouth, to measure job satisfaction through opinions about teaching loads, leave policies, research support, and work-life policies in order to measure job satisfaction. A detailed analysis of the questionnaire will be released later this summer.

Harvard ranked lower than peer institutions on most counts, says Mansbridge, who adds the result is hardly surprising given that the University only grants tenure at the senior level following the publication of at least two books.

But Professor of the Practice of Romance Languages and Literatures Kimberlee Campbell says the focus on tenure neglects a broad swath of longterm faculty—like preceptors—many of whom are women.

“My sense is that the 50 million is going to where it’s most visible which is tenure or almost tenure,” she says. “The issue is more complex than has 50 million made a difference to women on this faculty, but to which women and in which positions.”

In the next year, Hammonds’ office will work to establish stronger mentorship structures, survey the entire faculty, and attempt to collect data on more subtle indicators of discrimination such as amounts of lab space given to male versus female faculty members. The survey will be similar to the one examining internal bias conducted by MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins in 1999.

“I think this is a huge step,” Lamont says. “The fact that a parallel study will be conducted and that there is a structure to do it is humongous.”

If data collection sounds less than revolutionary, those involved in the project say it is essential to bringing Harvard up to speed with peer institutions.

“Data can sound very dry, but actually they can be the center of any effort for change,” Mansbridge says.

—Staff writer Natalie I. Sherman can be reached at nsherman@fas.harvard.edu.