According to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education this morning, “Harvard Announces New Policies Intended to Attract More Female and Minority Professors.”
Harvard University issued its first progress report Tuesday on the hiring of female and minority faculty members, announcing that it would spend $7.5-million over the next three years to improve working conditions for professors.
….
As part of the $7.5-million it pledged to spend, Harvard said it would:
- Add 100 new day-care slots on or near the campus, as well as spend $2-million on child-care “scholarships” for faculty and staff members. The size of the grants will be determined by employees’ income.
- Help professors with the cost of taking children and a caregiver along on extensive field-research trips.
- Allow male and female professors to take an entire 13-week paid semester off from teaching after the birth or adoption of a child. The faculty-development office will help academic departments pay to hire replacement instructors.
- Open an office of postdoctoral affairs this fall to deal with the employment concerns of the institution’s 6,400 postdoctoral fellows, including those in the medical school.
- Hold a lecture series for graduate students, called “Harvard University Women in Science and Society.”
These measures are the first installment of the payoff Harvard’s soon to be ex-president Larry Summers promised in a futile attempt to stem the tide of fury unleashed by his suggestion that there are possible gender differences in math ability that are worth studying.
Evelynn M. Hammonds, professor of History of Science and African and African American history and the senior vice provost who heads the office of faculty development and diversity, wrote in the preface of the report that these reforms were not just about “equity” and “fairness” and “justice” but about maintaining “ a competitive edge” by drawing upon “a much broader talent pool which reflects the diversity of our students and the world.”
Harvard University pursues the benefits of diversity among its faculty not because they help women or people of color, but because they bring us a more excellent faculty overall.
And, she maintains, “changes in our institutional culture are critical to the development of a diverse, world class faculty community.”
According to the Chronicle article,
Ms. Hammonds said that ideas for the spending initiative came from a “climate” survey of 244 junior faculty members, as well as from two committees that issued recommendations last year on how to improve conditions for women at the university (The Chronicle, May 27, 2005).
The survey found that junior professors were most concerned about the cost of living in the Harvard area, and about tenure requirements and “the unrelenting pressure to perform.” They cited as among the least effective policies at Harvard its child-care offerings, mentoring for young faculty members, and the assistance it gives junior professors who want to apply for outside research grants.
I’m sure this new largesse will be nice for the favored faculty members who receive it, but I’m not sure what it has to do with attracting a more “diverse” faculty. The survey, for example, tested the “climate” among junior faculty who are now at Harvard. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to do a survey of all the women and minorities who turned down offers from Harvard because Harvard lacked “100 new day care slots” or was missing an “office of post-doctoral affairs” or didn’t offer a lecture series on “Harvard University Women in Science and Society”?
What? You say it would be hard to find enough women and minority scholars who turned down offers from Harvard to survey?
If Harvard truly wants to attract more women and minority faculty members, it doesn’t have to spend millions of dollars on new benefits for those already there. All it has to do, with one exception, is what every other institution with the same desire does: lower its standards and extend offers to women and minorities to whom it would not have given offers in the absence of a determination to hire more women and minorities. You’d think they could figure this out, even at Harvard.
The exception is to spend whatever it takes (Harvard can afford it), not on covering field trip expenses for kids and babysitters etc., but simply luring “diverse” faculty from other institutions by offering astronomical salaries. True, that would reduce “diversity” at the other institutions, and it may produce some grousing among Harvard’s current faculty, who only have normally high salaries, and raise some questions about violating equal pay laws, but surely the benefit to Harvard, or its image, trumps such petty concerns.
These actions illustrate just how wealthy the U.S. has become.
In a society in which poverty and survival issues were at stake, these considerations would be laughable.
I guess that it is a good thing that we have become so preposterously wealthy that we can consider offering such perks to employees. I just think it would be a good idea if we ceased discussing the passing out of such fat goodies as having something to do with justice and civil rights.
And, how about a round of thanks and applause for those awful white men who created a society so rich and soft that women can function in the public sphere? When will leftist women abandon the aggrieved victim stance and admit that things have gotten mighty cushy?
Reminds me of the recent New York article that tried to redefine poverty as “relative poverty.” For once, a leftist admitted that even the “poor” in the U.S. are rich by any historical perspective. The lefty then tried to argue that the jealousy felt by the less than wealthy is a form of poverty in itself that the society must resolve.
I can see (just) how all this child-care business might attract potential female faculty, but it beats me how it’s even relevant to “minority” faculty qua minority faculty. Indeed, I can imagine some potential minority candidates being put off by the women and science lecture series: why isn’t it women and underrepresented minorities and science?
But, look, this is Harvard we’re talking about here. If there are top female and/or minority scholars working at second-tier institutions and a job falls open at Harvard, is it likely that many of them will not apply for it? Stuff like this is useful (if at all) only for luring away scholars already teaching at other top-tier institutions, and I hope and trust that it wouldn’t work well even there.
While perhaps dubious on a cost/benefit basis, I don’t see what the problem is on a moral basis. Harvard’s solution to its perceived demographic problem is not a thumb on the scale but a batch of facially neutral reforms intended to rectify structural problems facing female academics. From a conservative perspective this seems prety good, especially since the policies are not only gender-blind, but natalist to boot.
Anon – I have no objections to the way Harvard is spending its money on moral or other grounds. Indeed, any or all of these new initiatives may well be good things to do. My only point was that they would seem to have little relation to attracting a more “diverse” faculty, or even any more women, simply because it’s hard to imagine anyone turning down an offer from Harvard because of its lack of any of these new attractions.
Michelle —
Perhaps Harvard thinks this will attract those they deem “minorities” because Harvard thinks those people have a lot of babies.
(Or perhaps Harvardians just mindlessly prattle on, and “women and minorities” is just a slogan that is interchangeable with any other.)
John,
Not that I want to sound like I’m defending silliness like this — particularly the “lecture series” idiocy — but I believe the idea, at least with respect to women, is that it will allow Harvard to retain female professors.
I don’t think they’re worried about losing women to Yale so much as they’re worried about losing women to motherhood. The idea is that some female junior professor will have her kid and come back to work because, Hey! They have day care! instead of staying home with the kids.
(None of this has anything to do with minorities, of course.)
LTEC,
I vote for the second, parenthetical suggestion. I do believe there’s a macro for “women and minorities” on some people’s word processors; it saves needless keystrokes.
David Nieporent, you’re almost certainly right there. Retention is the obvious object, as I should’ve seen. The dilemma for hiring committees is that they want to end up with a gender-balanced faculty; they know that some women will leave to raise families; and yet they can’t just go ahead and hire women preferentially to end up with balance after the expected attrition.
Of course, this is assuming a process that is rather more organized than faculty hiring as I know it. On the one search in which I participated, the affirmative-action component consisted of our being required to state our reasons whenever any female or minority candidate was culled from the search, however preposterous the application. As no candidate was required to state ethnicity, this might have been difficult, except that everyone for whom it might have been a “plus” carefully plopped it into the third or fourth graf of the cover letter. ([paraphrasing from memory:] “As one of mixed African-American and Latino descent, I especially welcome the prospect of teaching UC/Berkeley’s famously diverse student body,” &c. Thanks, we got the hint, dude.)