The Chronicle of Higher Education
October 5, 2011
Washington
The U.S. Supreme Court briefly weighed how its recognition of a "ministerial exception" to federal civil-rights laws would affect colleges as it heard oral arguments on Wednesday in a case involving a teacher who alleged discrimination after being fired by a now-defunct religious elementary school.
In an exchange with Leondra R. Kruger, a U.S. Justice Department lawyer representing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. invoked a case in which a nun at a Roman Catholic university had alleged gender discrimination after being denied tenure.
Full Story: http://chronicle.com/article/Supreme-Court-Weighs-How/129286/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Showing posts with label tenure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tenure. Show all posts
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Monday, May 2, 2011
Discord in Harvard’s education school
The Boston Globe
Protesters want more focus on social issues
April 29, 2011By Tracy Jan, Globe Staff
The recent denial of tenure to a prominent Harvard scholar whose work focuses on grass-roots organizing has sparked student protests over the direction of one of the nation’s most influential education schools.
More than 50 doctoral students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education are demanding that the 91-year-old school redirect its mission. Over the last decade, they say, it has veered away from social justice issues in education toward more results-driven management and policy concerns. The students, who are groomed to be national leaders in education, said they fear the shift will hamper their professional development and tarnish the school’s reputation.
Full Story: http://articles.boston.com/2011-04-29/news/29488027_1_education-school-social-justice-student-protests
Protesters want more focus on social issues
April 29, 2011By Tracy Jan, Globe Staff
The recent denial of tenure to a prominent Harvard scholar whose work focuses on grass-roots organizing has sparked student protests over the direction of one of the nation’s most influential education schools.
More than 50 doctoral students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education are demanding that the 91-year-old school redirect its mission. Over the last decade, they say, it has veered away from social justice issues in education toward more results-driven management and policy concerns. The students, who are groomed to be national leaders in education, said they fear the shift will hamper their professional development and tarnish the school’s reputation.
Full Story: http://articles.boston.com/2011-04-29/news/29488027_1_education-school-social-justice-student-protests
Monday, July 6, 2009
Gender Bias at SUNY-Buffalo?
Inside Higher Ed
July 6, 2009
Earning tenure is never a sure thing, but Janet Shucard thought that she had done everything right.She and her husband joined the State University of New York at Buffalo as instructors in the neurology department in 1985. By 1998, the year she entered the tenure track, she had served as associate director of the department's division of development and behavioral neuroscience, head of the department of neurology medical psychotherapy service and assistant professor of neurology. She had published dozens of articles in prominent science journals. And she had pulled in research funding, most recently grants from the National Institutes of Health.When her tenure review process got underway, everything seemed on track. Shucard breezed through her department, chair, school, dean and, in a unanimous 7-0 vote, the president's review board -- an advisory board of professors across disciplines, appointed by the president. But then came the decisions from the university provost, Satish Tripathi, and president, John Simpson: negative.
Full Story: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/06/tenure
July 6, 2009
Earning tenure is never a sure thing, but Janet Shucard thought that she had done everything right.She and her husband joined the State University of New York at Buffalo as instructors in the neurology department in 1985. By 1998, the year she entered the tenure track, she had served as associate director of the department's division of development and behavioral neuroscience, head of the department of neurology medical psychotherapy service and assistant professor of neurology. She had published dozens of articles in prominent science journals. And she had pulled in research funding, most recently grants from the National Institutes of Health.When her tenure review process got underway, everything seemed on track. Shucard breezed through her department, chair, school, dean and, in a unanimous 7-0 vote, the president's review board -- an advisory board of professors across disciplines, appointed by the president. But then came the decisions from the university provost, Satish Tripathi, and president, John Simpson: negative.
Full Story: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/06/tenure
Monday, April 27, 2009
Not Moving On Up: Why Women Get Stuck at Associate Professor
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Monday, April 27, 2009
By AUDREY WILLIAMS JUNE
Message to deans, department chairs, and other administrators in higher education: Pay more attention to associate professors— particularly women, for whom the path to promotion is often murky and less traveled.
That's one of several recommendations from a panel of the Modern Language Association, whose new report, released today, describes how male associate professors in English and foreign languages are routinely promoted to full professor quicker than women are. To help reverse that trend, the MLA's Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession suggested several moves, such as backing away from the monograph as the dominant form of scholarship that counts toward advancement, attaching bigger salary increases to the jump from associate to full professor, and creating mentor programs that focus specifically on preparing associate professors for promotion. The report, "Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey," is available on the association's Web site.
"Every associate professor should be promoted at some point," said Kathleen Woodward, a professor of English at the University of Washington and the report's lead author. "Universities have devoted so much attention to assistant professors trying to get tenure, as they should, but associate professors are important, too."
The report shows that women at doctoral institutions take two and a half years longer than men to reach full professor. The gap shrinks to one and a half years at master's institutions, and the smallest gap—a year is at baccalaureate colleges. A closer look at private independent colleges by the association revealed that women there take three and a half years longer than their male counterparts to advance to associate professor.
Over all, the average time to promotion for female associate professors is 8.2 years, compared with 6.6 years for men.
And although many studies show that female academics spend more time caring for children than do their male peers, the association's report found that such family obligations aren't the tipping point when it comes to advancement. Women are promoted more slowly than men, no matter what their marital or parental status is, according to the report, for which 400 professors were surveyed.
Full Story: http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/04/16759n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en (Subscription required)
Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession Releases Its Report on the Associate Professor Survey
The Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, as part of the committee's Associate Professor Project, has written a report presenting findings of the MLA's 2006 survey of MLA members who hold the rank of professor and associate professor and teach English or other modern languages in United States colleges and universities. The data reveal differences in the career paths and progress of men and women in the fields of language and literature represented in the MLA, including the number of years spent at the rank of associate professor before promotion to professor; time devoted to research, teaching, service, and other professional activities; time given to personal commitments such as child care, elder care, and other family responsibilities; views of tenure and promotion; and job satisfaction.
Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey http://www.mla.org/
Full Report
Key Findings
Monday, April 27, 2009
By AUDREY WILLIAMS JUNE
Message to deans, department chairs, and other administrators in higher education: Pay more attention to associate professors— particularly women, for whom the path to promotion is often murky and less traveled.
That's one of several recommendations from a panel of the Modern Language Association, whose new report, released today, describes how male associate professors in English and foreign languages are routinely promoted to full professor quicker than women are. To help reverse that trend, the MLA's Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession suggested several moves, such as backing away from the monograph as the dominant form of scholarship that counts toward advancement, attaching bigger salary increases to the jump from associate to full professor, and creating mentor programs that focus specifically on preparing associate professors for promotion. The report, "Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey," is available on the association's Web site.
"Every associate professor should be promoted at some point," said Kathleen Woodward, a professor of English at the University of Washington and the report's lead author. "Universities have devoted so much attention to assistant professors trying to get tenure, as they should, but associate professors are important, too."
The report shows that women at doctoral institutions take two and a half years longer than men to reach full professor. The gap shrinks to one and a half years at master's institutions, and the smallest gap—a year is at baccalaureate colleges. A closer look at private independent colleges by the association revealed that women there take three and a half years longer than their male counterparts to advance to associate professor.
Over all, the average time to promotion for female associate professors is 8.2 years, compared with 6.6 years for men.
And although many studies show that female academics spend more time caring for children than do their male peers, the association's report found that such family obligations aren't the tipping point when it comes to advancement. Women are promoted more slowly than men, no matter what their marital or parental status is, according to the report, for which 400 professors were surveyed.
Full Story: http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/04/16759n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en (Subscription required)
Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession Releases Its Report on the Associate Professor Survey
The Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, as part of the committee's Associate Professor Project, has written a report presenting findings of the MLA's 2006 survey of MLA members who hold the rank of professor and associate professor and teach English or other modern languages in United States colleges and universities. The data reveal differences in the career paths and progress of men and women in the fields of language and literature represented in the MLA, including the number of years spent at the rank of associate professor before promotion to professor; time devoted to research, teaching, service, and other professional activities; time given to personal commitments such as child care, elder care, and other family responsibilities; views of tenure and promotion; and job satisfaction.
Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey http://www.mla.org/
Full Report
Key Findings
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Creating a Sustainable Pipeline
Diverse Issues in Higher Education
by Calvin Hennick
Feb 18, 2009, 05:12
When Dr. James L. Sherley began a hunger strike outside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provost’s office in February 2007 alleging racism in his tenure denial, the then-associate professor of biological engineering re-ignited, in a very public way, concerns about the institution’s commitment to diversity.
The lack of diversity has been a recurring problem at MIT. At the time of Sherley’s protest, just 27 of MIT’s 740 tenured faculty members were American Indian, Black and Hispanic. Today, there are 34 underrepresented minorities out of 767 tenured faculty members.
Sherley never won tenure, and a Black faculty member and a Black former trustee broke their ties to MIT as well in protest over the manner in which the school handled the Sherley incident as well as its seeming lack of commitment to diversity. Two years later, the administration is taking steps to ensure the school is welcoming to faculty members of color — an effort some say is moving too slowly.
‘Something Widespread’
Many of Sherley’s supporters say they were not in a position to know if he should have been granted tenure based on his scientific credentials. However, former MIT professor Frank Douglas and former trustee Bernard Loyd, who both left the university as a result of how Sherley was treated, say the case was symptomatic of an unwillingness to grapple with diversity issues, a problem they had witnessed during their relationships with the school.
“I was not insisting that James should get tenure because I was not present at the university when [the tenure denial] happened,” says Douglas. “I didn’t know the case. My issue was, ‘Is there an environment which led him to believe that he was treated unfairly?’ And, in fact, I think there were things that gave him reason to believe he was treated unfairly.”
In a letter circulated at the beginning of Sherley’s hunger strike, 11 MIT faculty members (Douglas was not one of them) outlined what they said were a number of problems with the case. Supporters pointed out what they said were problems with the mentoring and lab space that Sherley received, felt that the school had failed to adequately acknowledge Sherley’s achievements, and asserted that Sherley’s racial discrimination complaint was mishandled.
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rejected Sherley’s racial discrimination complaint in February 2008, saying in its ruling that MIT had articulated legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons for denying tenure. Last June, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination also rejected Sherley’s complaint.
In his interaction with other faculty, Douglas says, “what I discovered … is that many of the young [minority] faculty were unsure as to how they would be evaluated and what type of career they would have.”
“What I also discovered is that there were a number of individuals who left MIT, either because they did not receive tenure or because they felt unwelcome. James Sherley is a symbol of something that is more widespread than you would think,” adds Douglas, who is now a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, a partner at PureTech Ventures, and a senior scientific adviser for Bayer Healthcare.
Former MIT trustee Loyd, who finished his five-year trustee stint in 1995 but stayed active on university committees, says the Sherley case was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“We had been told by senior leaders within MIT that these were important issues, but they needed time,” Loyd says. “Time came and went.”
Full Story: http://diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_12312.shtml
by Calvin Hennick
Feb 18, 2009, 05:12
When Dr. James L. Sherley began a hunger strike outside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provost’s office in February 2007 alleging racism in his tenure denial, the then-associate professor of biological engineering re-ignited, in a very public way, concerns about the institution’s commitment to diversity.
The lack of diversity has been a recurring problem at MIT. At the time of Sherley’s protest, just 27 of MIT’s 740 tenured faculty members were American Indian, Black and Hispanic. Today, there are 34 underrepresented minorities out of 767 tenured faculty members.
Sherley never won tenure, and a Black faculty member and a Black former trustee broke their ties to MIT as well in protest over the manner in which the school handled the Sherley incident as well as its seeming lack of commitment to diversity. Two years later, the administration is taking steps to ensure the school is welcoming to faculty members of color — an effort some say is moving too slowly.
‘Something Widespread’
Many of Sherley’s supporters say they were not in a position to know if he should have been granted tenure based on his scientific credentials. However, former MIT professor Frank Douglas and former trustee Bernard Loyd, who both left the university as a result of how Sherley was treated, say the case was symptomatic of an unwillingness to grapple with diversity issues, a problem they had witnessed during their relationships with the school.
“I was not insisting that James should get tenure because I was not present at the university when [the tenure denial] happened,” says Douglas. “I didn’t know the case. My issue was, ‘Is there an environment which led him to believe that he was treated unfairly?’ And, in fact, I think there were things that gave him reason to believe he was treated unfairly.”
In a letter circulated at the beginning of Sherley’s hunger strike, 11 MIT faculty members (Douglas was not one of them) outlined what they said were a number of problems with the case. Supporters pointed out what they said were problems with the mentoring and lab space that Sherley received, felt that the school had failed to adequately acknowledge Sherley’s achievements, and asserted that Sherley’s racial discrimination complaint was mishandled.
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rejected Sherley’s racial discrimination complaint in February 2008, saying in its ruling that MIT had articulated legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons for denying tenure. Last June, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination also rejected Sherley’s complaint.
In his interaction with other faculty, Douglas says, “what I discovered … is that many of the young [minority] faculty were unsure as to how they would be evaluated and what type of career they would have.”
“What I also discovered is that there were a number of individuals who left MIT, either because they did not receive tenure or because they felt unwelcome. James Sherley is a symbol of something that is more widespread than you would think,” adds Douglas, who is now a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, a partner at PureTech Ventures, and a senior scientific adviser for Bayer Healthcare.
Former MIT trustee Loyd, who finished his five-year trustee stint in 1995 but stayed active on university committees, says the Sherley case was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“We had been told by senior leaders within MIT that these were important issues, but they needed time,” Loyd says. “Time came and went.”
Full Story: http://diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_12312.shtml
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Many Black Women Veer Off Path to Tenure, Researchers Say
The Chronicle of Higher Education
September 9, 2008
Washington — Black women appear to be substantially less likely than other segments of the population to get on and stay on academe’s tenure track, according to a forthcoming report commissioned by the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education.
The report, the highlights of which the association presented here today, says survey data collected from doctoral recipients suggest that “black women have a distaste for or trouble navigating some aspects of the tenure process,” even though they do not appear to have any distaste for academe itself.
“We don’t know what is going on, but the data suggest that black women are not faring as well” as other groups, said Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe, a professor of economics at the University of Vermont and research fellow at the Institute for Higher Education Law and Governance. Ms. Sharpe is a co-author of the report, along with William A. Darity Jr., a professor of African-American studies, economics, and public policy at Duke University, and Omari H. Swinton, an assistant professor of economics at Howard University.
The researchers based their analysis on data from surveys that the National Science Foundation has administered to the same doctoral recipients repeatedly since the the early 1990s, to track their progress over time. The fields covered by the surveys included engineering, mathematics, the sciences, and the social sciences. [To read the full story, go to: http://chronicle.com/news/article/5111/many-black-women-veer-off-path-to-tenure-researchers-say?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en ]
September 9, 2008
Washington — Black women appear to be substantially less likely than other segments of the population to get on and stay on academe’s tenure track, according to a forthcoming report commissioned by the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education.
The report, the highlights of which the association presented here today, says survey data collected from doctoral recipients suggest that “black women have a distaste for or trouble navigating some aspects of the tenure process,” even though they do not appear to have any distaste for academe itself.
“We don’t know what is going on, but the data suggest that black women are not faring as well” as other groups, said Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe, a professor of economics at the University of Vermont and research fellow at the Institute for Higher Education Law and Governance. Ms. Sharpe is a co-author of the report, along with William A. Darity Jr., a professor of African-American studies, economics, and public policy at Duke University, and Omari H. Swinton, an assistant professor of economics at Howard University.
The researchers based their analysis on data from surveys that the National Science Foundation has administered to the same doctoral recipients repeatedly since the the early 1990s, to track their progress over time. The fields covered by the surveys included engineering, mathematics, the sciences, and the social sciences. [To read the full story, go to: http://chronicle.com/news/article/5111/many-black-women-veer-off-path-to-tenure-researchers-say?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en ]
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Tracking Bias or Guilt by Association?
Inside Higher Education
Dec. 19
Tracking Bias or Guilt by Association?
If a professor is a member of a church that holds anti-gay views, and isn’t forthright about those views, does that make the professor’s vote against the tenure bid of a gay professor suspect?
That is one of the questions explored in an unusual lawsuit against the University of Michigan — filed nearly three years ago but thus far bogged down in preliminary motions. State courts have twice rejected requests by Michigan to have the case dismissed and a third request was scheduled to be heard this week, but postponed. The professor, Peter Hammer, won a majority of votes of the faculty of the law school in his case. But the 18-12 margin was two shy of the two-thirds requirement to win tenure, so he lost his job, and now is a professor of law at Wayne State University. He says he was the first male faculty member rejected by the faculty for tenure in 40 years.
Like lots of tenure disputes, this one has many facets — debates on Hammer’s scholarship, disputes on deadlines and technical parts of the tenure and grievance process at Michigan. And as is the case with many tenure lawsuits, the university says that it and its employees cannot respond to specific questions about the case. The university does, however, say that the quality of Hammer’s scholarship cost him his tenure bid, not his sexual orientation, and the university’s briefs cite critics of his scholarship, just as supporters of the tenure bid cited praise. (Many documents about the case are available on a Web site maintained by the gay organization of the Wayne State law school, the OUTlaws.)
Some parts of the tenure suit — however it is eventually resolved — have raised new legal theories with potential ramification beyond Hammer and Michigan. To Hammer, these factors point to the vulnerability of gay faculty members to bias and the need for more protections and more legal approaches to fight discrimination. But some experts on tenure and higher education are worried that these arguments — whatever the veracity of Hammer’s claims — pose dangers to the tenure process.
Hammer’s suit is based on contract law, not discrimination law; there are no federal or Michigan laws barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation on which he could sue. His suit is based on the idea that he was assured when accepting the job at Michigan (and turning down other offers) of the university’s commitment to equity for gay employees, as outlined in the faculty handbook and various university policies. Hammer’s legal specialties are health policy and Southeast Asia, especially Cambodia. So while he was out to colleagues, his teaching and scholarship did not focus on gay issues.
One part of Michigan’s defense that Hammer said raises questions about the university’s commitment to equity (and that the university has withdrawn) was to argue that the statements in university policies barring bias against gay people couldn’t be enforced in court. When Hammer and his lawyers saw that argument, Hammer approached the gay faculty group at Michigan and said he showed them that under this legal theory of the university’s, gay employees had no real rights against bias.
R. Van Harrison, a professor of medical education at Michigan and coordinator of the University of Michigan LGBT Faculty Alliance, confirmed that after Hammer told the group about the legal argument being made, gay faculty members had meetings with senior administrators at Michigan, who then agreed to withdraw that stance.
An argument made by Hammer is also attracting attention. He examined the records and backgrounds of some of the faculty members who voted against him. In several cases (enough to affect the outcome of the vote), he argues that the professors’ comments or writings or affiliations raise questions about their fairness — especially because in the discovery process he maintains that they were not forthright about their beliefs. For example, one professor is a member of a church that will not admit gay people unless they promise to “reform their ways,” according to court documents. Yet the professor, according to depositions and statements provided by Hammer’s lawyer, denied knowing his church’s views on gay people, even though they are identifiable from links on the church’s Web site, and the professor teaches Sunday school there. In another case, a professor’s opposition to same-sex marriage is cited. Another faculty member wrote of gay people as a “pariah group.”
In discovery, Hammer’s lawyers asked these and other professors questions about hot-button social issues (not only on gay rights, but abortion in some cases) to document what Hammer considers to be a pattern of people with conservative social values misrepresenting their own views. (In all of these cases, the professors have said that they voted against Hammer because they didn’t think his scholarship rose to the necessary level of excellence and not because Hammer is gay, and the university backs these professors.)
[To read the entire article, go to: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/19/hammer]
Dec. 19
Tracking Bias or Guilt by Association?
If a professor is a member of a church that holds anti-gay views, and isn’t forthright about those views, does that make the professor’s vote against the tenure bid of a gay professor suspect?
That is one of the questions explored in an unusual lawsuit against the University of Michigan — filed nearly three years ago but thus far bogged down in preliminary motions. State courts have twice rejected requests by Michigan to have the case dismissed and a third request was scheduled to be heard this week, but postponed. The professor, Peter Hammer, won a majority of votes of the faculty of the law school in his case. But the 18-12 margin was two shy of the two-thirds requirement to win tenure, so he lost his job, and now is a professor of law at Wayne State University. He says he was the first male faculty member rejected by the faculty for tenure in 40 years.
Like lots of tenure disputes, this one has many facets — debates on Hammer’s scholarship, disputes on deadlines and technical parts of the tenure and grievance process at Michigan. And as is the case with many tenure lawsuits, the university says that it and its employees cannot respond to specific questions about the case. The university does, however, say that the quality of Hammer’s scholarship cost him his tenure bid, not his sexual orientation, and the university’s briefs cite critics of his scholarship, just as supporters of the tenure bid cited praise. (Many documents about the case are available on a Web site maintained by the gay organization of the Wayne State law school, the OUTlaws.)
Some parts of the tenure suit — however it is eventually resolved — have raised new legal theories with potential ramification beyond Hammer and Michigan. To Hammer, these factors point to the vulnerability of gay faculty members to bias and the need for more protections and more legal approaches to fight discrimination. But some experts on tenure and higher education are worried that these arguments — whatever the veracity of Hammer’s claims — pose dangers to the tenure process.
Hammer’s suit is based on contract law, not discrimination law; there are no federal or Michigan laws barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation on which he could sue. His suit is based on the idea that he was assured when accepting the job at Michigan (and turning down other offers) of the university’s commitment to equity for gay employees, as outlined in the faculty handbook and various university policies. Hammer’s legal specialties are health policy and Southeast Asia, especially Cambodia. So while he was out to colleagues, his teaching and scholarship did not focus on gay issues.
One part of Michigan’s defense that Hammer said raises questions about the university’s commitment to equity (and that the university has withdrawn) was to argue that the statements in university policies barring bias against gay people couldn’t be enforced in court. When Hammer and his lawyers saw that argument, Hammer approached the gay faculty group at Michigan and said he showed them that under this legal theory of the university’s, gay employees had no real rights against bias.
R. Van Harrison, a professor of medical education at Michigan and coordinator of the University of Michigan LGBT Faculty Alliance, confirmed that after Hammer told the group about the legal argument being made, gay faculty members had meetings with senior administrators at Michigan, who then agreed to withdraw that stance.
An argument made by Hammer is also attracting attention. He examined the records and backgrounds of some of the faculty members who voted against him. In several cases (enough to affect the outcome of the vote), he argues that the professors’ comments or writings or affiliations raise questions about their fairness — especially because in the discovery process he maintains that they were not forthright about their beliefs. For example, one professor is a member of a church that will not admit gay people unless they promise to “reform their ways,” according to court documents. Yet the professor, according to depositions and statements provided by Hammer’s lawyer, denied knowing his church’s views on gay people, even though they are identifiable from links on the church’s Web site, and the professor teaches Sunday school there. In another case, a professor’s opposition to same-sex marriage is cited. Another faculty member wrote of gay people as a “pariah group.”
In discovery, Hammer’s lawyers asked these and other professors questions about hot-button social issues (not only on gay rights, but abortion in some cases) to document what Hammer considers to be a pattern of people with conservative social values misrepresenting their own views. (In all of these cases, the professors have said that they voted against Hammer because they didn’t think his scholarship rose to the necessary level of excellence and not because Hammer is gay, and the university backs these professors.)
[To read the entire article, go to: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/19/hammer]
Monday, December 10, 2007
Tenure at MIT still largely a male domain
By Linda K. Wertheimer, Globe Staff December 6, 2007
Just one out of 25 faculty members granted tenure this year at MIT is female, a gender imbalance that appears to contrast with the university's decade-old effort to boost the status of women.
Women have been achieving tenure at a lower rater than men at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the past 10 years, according to an MIT analysis of junior faculty. Of the tenured faculty, 16 percent are women, up from 10.5 percent a decade ago, but still too big a gap, several professors said.
The point was brought home recently when the school's in-house newspaper published a portrait gallery of the faculty members granted tenure this year; among the sea of male faces was the lone woman.
"The truth is what we're looking for is 50 percent parity," said tenured professor Ruth Perry, who has taught literature at the university since 1972. "There has been a slacking off. People aren't paying enough attention."
MIT President Susan Hockfield, who became the university's first woman president in 2004, said the photo of just one woman was "unsettling," but not a sign of MIT backing off its pledge to hire more women and improve their tenure rate. Tenure, which provides professors life-time job protection as well as prestige, can take four to seven years to earn depending on their talent, experience, and field.
"We are absolutely committed to accelerating our progress, and we want to be able to show that progress every single year," Hockfield said. "But all of the variables that go into this mean some years, it's not going to look as good as we want it to look."
MIT's appointment this year of engineering professor Barbara Liskov as a new associate provost for faculty equity is an example of the university's commitment, Hockfield said.
The school emphasizes that the tenure data are preliminary because more faculty may win promotions during the remainder of the academic year. Between 1997 and now, the number of junior faculty women granted tenure has ranged from zero to eight a year, according to data provided by MIT at the Globe's request. The number of junior faculty men granted tenure ranged from 10 to 24 a year over the same period.
An MIT analysis of junior faculty who could have vied for tenure during the last decade found that 41 percent of 104 women were granted tenure, compared with 48 percent of the 372 men hired.
Liskov and Hockfield said the university will investigate impediments to women receiving tenure.
"It's very hard to know whether you're making progress or standing still," Liskov said. "One year is not really the issue. It's over time. I would like to see the rate for men and women be equal."
MIT set off a national examination of gender equity in higher education in 1999 when the university published a report on gender bias in its School of Science. The group, led by Nancy Hopkins, a tenured biology professor and longtime leader on gender equity issues at the university, said in the report that the school routinely underpaid, marginalized, and disrespected female faculty in numerous ways, including providing less lab and office space and giving them scant representation on hiring and funding committees.
At the urging of then President Charles Vest, who agreed with the report's findings, MIT created committees to study gender bias at each of its schools. In 2002, reports from those committees reached the same conclusion about their individual schools: gender bias was pervasive.
MIT passed policies designed to attract more female applicants and retain women faculty. Since 2001, for example, the school has automatically stopped the tenure clock for up to a year after a woman has her first child. In the past, if faculty members had not reached tenure by the seventh year at the school, they would lose out on the opportunity.
To achieve tenure, a junior faculty member has to win approval from several committees, starting with a group within the professor's department, then a school-wide committee, and finally a committee of all five of MIT schools' deans chaired by the university president.
Robert Brown, MIT's provost from 1998 to 2005 and now the president of Boston University, oversaw the bulk of MIT's work on women's issues. After the 2002 reports, he said, MIT wanted "to become the leader in mentoring young female faculty and monitoring the careers of tenured women, and working more aggressively to increase their numbers."
Universities nationwide, particularly those with a scientific focus like MIT, are struggling to achieve gender parity in tenure, said John Curtis, director of research and public policy at the American Association of University Professors.
The association's 2006 study on faculty gender equity reported that at doctoral universities, on average, a quarter of tenured faculty are women. MIT's rate is comparable to schools with a more scientific bent, like the California Institute of Technology, where 11 percent of tenured faculty last year were women, Curtis said. At Harvard, 20 percent of the tenured faculty were women.
"This is really slow progress, and it will take decades before women are on more equal footing with men," Curtis said.
Brown said he continues to believe that tenure rates for women will improve if universities hire more junior women faculty, and make it easier for them to juggle family responsibilities.
MIT has made strides in hiring more women, increasing their percentage on the faculty from 14.7 percent in 1998 to 19.3 percent today. And in the past two years, Hockfield said, roughly a third of the hires have been women.
MIT, though, is at a disadvantage because the bulk of its professors are in such male-dominated fields as computer science, physics, math, and other scientific disciplines, and fewer women are entering the pipeline for jobs in those areas. BU faces similar issues when it recruits for certain disciplines, Brown said.
Hopkins, an outspoken critic of former Harvard president Lawrence Summers for his remarks about women's ability in the sciences, said it was unnerving to see only one woman among the newly tenured professors featured in last month's Tech Talk newspaper.
"It's a shock. I don't have a thousand words as good as that picture," said Hopkins. "It's a good reminder. We learned a lot about this problem, but good will and time do not solve that problem."
Hopkins and other professors said that despite the latest figures, they want MIT to continue primarily promoting from within to improve tenure rates, rather than adopt other universities' practice of recruiting other colleges' stars to rapidly increase the proportion of tenured women.
[To read the entire article, go to: http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/12/06/tenure_at_mit_still_largely_a_male_domain/]
Just one out of 25 faculty members granted tenure this year at MIT is female, a gender imbalance that appears to contrast with the university's decade-old effort to boost the status of women.
Women have been achieving tenure at a lower rater than men at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the past 10 years, according to an MIT analysis of junior faculty. Of the tenured faculty, 16 percent are women, up from 10.5 percent a decade ago, but still too big a gap, several professors said.
The point was brought home recently when the school's in-house newspaper published a portrait gallery of the faculty members granted tenure this year; among the sea of male faces was the lone woman.
"The truth is what we're looking for is 50 percent parity," said tenured professor Ruth Perry, who has taught literature at the university since 1972. "There has been a slacking off. People aren't paying enough attention."
MIT President Susan Hockfield, who became the university's first woman president in 2004, said the photo of just one woman was "unsettling," but not a sign of MIT backing off its pledge to hire more women and improve their tenure rate. Tenure, which provides professors life-time job protection as well as prestige, can take four to seven years to earn depending on their talent, experience, and field.
"We are absolutely committed to accelerating our progress, and we want to be able to show that progress every single year," Hockfield said. "But all of the variables that go into this mean some years, it's not going to look as good as we want it to look."
MIT's appointment this year of engineering professor Barbara Liskov as a new associate provost for faculty equity is an example of the university's commitment, Hockfield said.
The school emphasizes that the tenure data are preliminary because more faculty may win promotions during the remainder of the academic year. Between 1997 and now, the number of junior faculty women granted tenure has ranged from zero to eight a year, according to data provided by MIT at the Globe's request. The number of junior faculty men granted tenure ranged from 10 to 24 a year over the same period.
An MIT analysis of junior faculty who could have vied for tenure during the last decade found that 41 percent of 104 women were granted tenure, compared with 48 percent of the 372 men hired.
Liskov and Hockfield said the university will investigate impediments to women receiving tenure.
"It's very hard to know whether you're making progress or standing still," Liskov said. "One year is not really the issue. It's over time. I would like to see the rate for men and women be equal."
MIT set off a national examination of gender equity in higher education in 1999 when the university published a report on gender bias in its School of Science. The group, led by Nancy Hopkins, a tenured biology professor and longtime leader on gender equity issues at the university, said in the report that the school routinely underpaid, marginalized, and disrespected female faculty in numerous ways, including providing less lab and office space and giving them scant representation on hiring and funding committees.
At the urging of then President Charles Vest, who agreed with the report's findings, MIT created committees to study gender bias at each of its schools. In 2002, reports from those committees reached the same conclusion about their individual schools: gender bias was pervasive.
MIT passed policies designed to attract more female applicants and retain women faculty. Since 2001, for example, the school has automatically stopped the tenure clock for up to a year after a woman has her first child. In the past, if faculty members had not reached tenure by the seventh year at the school, they would lose out on the opportunity.
To achieve tenure, a junior faculty member has to win approval from several committees, starting with a group within the professor's department, then a school-wide committee, and finally a committee of all five of MIT schools' deans chaired by the university president.
Robert Brown, MIT's provost from 1998 to 2005 and now the president of Boston University, oversaw the bulk of MIT's work on women's issues. After the 2002 reports, he said, MIT wanted "to become the leader in mentoring young female faculty and monitoring the careers of tenured women, and working more aggressively to increase their numbers."
Universities nationwide, particularly those with a scientific focus like MIT, are struggling to achieve gender parity in tenure, said John Curtis, director of research and public policy at the American Association of University Professors.
The association's 2006 study on faculty gender equity reported that at doctoral universities, on average, a quarter of tenured faculty are women. MIT's rate is comparable to schools with a more scientific bent, like the California Institute of Technology, where 11 percent of tenured faculty last year were women, Curtis said. At Harvard, 20 percent of the tenured faculty were women.
"This is really slow progress, and it will take decades before women are on more equal footing with men," Curtis said.
Brown said he continues to believe that tenure rates for women will improve if universities hire more junior women faculty, and make it easier for them to juggle family responsibilities.
MIT has made strides in hiring more women, increasing their percentage on the faculty from 14.7 percent in 1998 to 19.3 percent today. And in the past two years, Hockfield said, roughly a third of the hires have been women.
MIT, though, is at a disadvantage because the bulk of its professors are in such male-dominated fields as computer science, physics, math, and other scientific disciplines, and fewer women are entering the pipeline for jobs in those areas. BU faces similar issues when it recruits for certain disciplines, Brown said.
Hopkins, an outspoken critic of former Harvard president Lawrence Summers for his remarks about women's ability in the sciences, said it was unnerving to see only one woman among the newly tenured professors featured in last month's Tech Talk newspaper.
"It's a shock. I don't have a thousand words as good as that picture," said Hopkins. "It's a good reminder. We learned a lot about this problem, but good will and time do not solve that problem."
Hopkins and other professors said that despite the latest figures, they want MIT to continue primarily promoting from within to improve tenure rates, rather than adopt other universities' practice of recruiting other colleges' stars to rapidly increase the proportion of tenured women.
[To read the entire article, go to: http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/12/06/tenure_at_mit_still_largely_a_male_domain/]
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