Harvard faculty push gender issue

A group of more than 50 senior Harvard University professors met with president Lawrence H. Summers yesterday to ask him to reverse a sharp drop in senior job offers to female professors during his three-year presidency.

Yesterday's meeting, at the Barker Center for the Humanities, was requested by the professors to discuss an issue that has rapidly gained momentum among the Harvard faculty. In the past two weeks, since Harvard's statistics on hiring women became public, a new professors' group has arisen: the Senior Faculty Caucus for Gender Equality, which now has 70 members, or four-fifths of the female senior professors who teach at Harvard College. Several male professors have also joined.

Last year, Harvard figures show, women received four of 32 tenure offers in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. That number has dropped each year of Summers's presidency; during the 2000-2001 academic year, the last year Neil L. Rudenstine was president, women received 36 percent of Harvard's tenured job offers.

In interviews yesterday, Summers and two professors offered contrasting accounts of the meeting.

Summers declined to discuss details, but said he took the faculty members' concerns seriously. ''We welcome the opportunity to cooperate with many members of the faculty," he said.

In separate interviews, however, the two professors said they were disappointed with the response from Summers and William C. Kirby, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

''They acknowledged that there's a problem, but they were basically saying, 'Leave it to us,' " said one senior faculty member who attended the meeting. The professor spoke on condition of anonymity, saying she wanted to preserve her ability to work with the administration.

''Looking at the results of the last three years, I don't think people felt terribly comfortable with that answer," the faculty member said.

In the meeting, the professors asked Summers and Kirby to boost the presence of women in high-ranking positions and to ''counter the perception that the administration sees only men as 'stars' worthy of serious retention efforts," according to a two-page set of proposals the faculty members presented to Summers and Kirby before the meeting.

In that document, the professors point out that ''there are almost no faculty women in academic leadership positions." At institutions such as Yale, MIT, Princeton, and Stanford, they say, women hold more visible and powerful posts.

The professors recommend that the administration appoint a dean charged with improving faculty diversity, something that Harvard had until several years ago. But Kirby and Summers rejected that idea, said a second senior faculty member at the meeting, who also declined to be named. Harvard officials have previously said that new divisional deans are better positioned to improve diversity, and Summers said a diverse faculty has always been a priority for him.

''Diversity is crucial to our success in teaching and to the diversity of perspectives in our intellectual debate, and we will not find the most excellent people if we are not drawing on all segments of our society," Summers said in an interview yesterday. ''Last year's results as a template are manifestly unacceptable. We have to do better."

The professors' document asks Summers to ensure that women get competitive compensation packages, to include women every time a university-wide committee is formed to consider a tenure case, and to consult the Standing Committee on Women on all major changes in the university.

It declares that every department, institute, and center should include senior women, and it singles out as a ''cause for concern" the new Broad Institute, a $300 million venture with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which the professors said has no women on its core faculty.

Summers and Kirby declined to discuss with the Globe their responses to specific proposals.

The second professor at the meeting said Summers suggested he feared giving an impression that he was bowing to pressure. ''He basically said if you put too much emphasis on hiring women, people will say you are just hiring them for demographic reasons," the professor said.

Asked in an interview to clarify what he had meant, Summers said, ''The university has a longstanding tradition, which as president I have a particular obligation to uphold . . . that appointments are made because of excellence in teaching and research and not to fill quotas.

''That's got to be the way it is in the university," he said. ''And that is entirely consistent with continuing the long-term trend toward increased diversity in the faculty."

Bombardieri can be reached at bombardieri@globe.com.