Harvard staff grants aim to boost diversity
Harvard University will expand child-care and academic grants to support female and minority faculty and staff as they climb the ladder at the prestigious school, university officials plan to announce today.
The plan outlines the first steps that Harvard will take to spend the more than $50 million that president Lawrence H. Summers pledged about a year ago to improve the climate for women on campus. Summers caused a furor last year by speculating about women's aptitude for science. That episode, coupled with complaints about his management style, led to his resignation, effective June 30.
The episode also led to two task forces, a flurry of recommendations, and a new position, a senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity. The office of Evelynn M. Hammonds will release its first annual report today.
Hammonds said in a telephone interview yesterday that Harvard will spend $7.5 million on child care and grants to help faculty and staff meet the demands of work and family.
Women make up less than a quarter of the tenured faculty in most schools within Harvard, the report found, while minorities make up less than 15 percent of tenured faculty in most schools at the university.
But more women and minorities are in the pipeline to tenured positions, as long as Harvard can keep them, Hammonds said. Women make up 8 percent in the natural sciences tenured faculty, but 25 percent of those on the track to tenure.
``We will be helping them with the issues that affect their productivity as scholars," she said. ``This is a significant first step."
Harvard will add 100 child-care slots over the next three years to the 350 on campus, reducing a waiting list of 150 children by expanding day-care centers and access to a regional network for off campus services.
Harvard also will boost its subsidy for the six existing day-care centers to $1.2 million, a 50 percent increase, and raise child-care scholarships to about $2 million, a 53 percent increase, to help faculty and staff pay for child care on or off campus.
The report also creates maternity- and paternity-leave guidelines for faculty , recommending, among other things, that new mothers take the semester off, instead of a few weeks, when they give birth.
On the academic side, $500,000 will pay for extra staffers and equipment to aid junior professors with research to avoid delaying their path to tenure. Junior faculty also will be eligible for up to two travel grants a year to cover child care expenses at academic conferences or meetings.
``What we've tried to do with these enhancements is address what people told us were issues," said Marilyn Hausammann, Harvard's vice president for human resources. ``As you might expect, they are potential obstacles to a person's career here."
A survey of 244 faculty last fall found that professors wanted more informal mentoring on campus and help with teaching demands. Faculty rated child care the least effective of Harvard policies and practices.
The three worst aspects of working at Harvard in the survey included the high cost of living -- 44 percent of professors earned less than $90,000 a year -- requirements to obtain tenure, and ``unrelenting pressure to perform."
The best aspects, the survey showed, were the quality of colleagues and graduate students, and the leave time to conduct research.
