Women Ivy presidents see hope

CAMBRIDGE -- As a graduate student at Harvard University, Ruth Simmons recalled, she wrote the best essay in a literature class, only to have the professor shun her, presumably because she was black or a woman or both.

Yesterday, more than three decades later on that same campus, the Brown University president joined fellow women presidents of the Ivy League to discuss a "tipping point" in higher education. When Drew Gilpin Faust takes office at Harvard on July 1, half of the venerable league's eight schools will be led by women.

Simmons said the four -- including the University of Pennsylvania's president, Amy Gutmann, and Princeton's president, Shirley Tilghman -- have carved a path that will grow among the Ivies and beyond.

"When it starts to become the issue of being the last Ivy League school to have a woman president -- who wants to do that?" Simmons said at the forum sponsored by Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. "This is a league, and this is a league based on competition."

But women still are not proportionately represented in the ranks of tenured faculty at the world's major research universities, the panelists said. Reforms in parental leave and merit-based hiring are needed for women professors to catch up, Tilghman said.

"It is much too early to declare either victory or defeat," she said. "In a way, the Ivy League is anomalous among research universities in the world."

The presidents each acknowledged their relentless ambition, but at the same time said they wound up at the head of four of the world's leading universities almost by accident.

Faust pointed out that the women gathered at Harvard two years ago, then under tense circumstances.

Faust, then dean of Radcliffe, urged the women presidents to begin a campus dialogue to help beat back the storm caused by the comments of Lawrence Summers, then Harvard's president, that genetic gender differences may explain why few women rise to top science jobs.

Tilghman, a biology professor and researcher, addressed the subject again yesterday, saying that to advance in science, she needed determination, but also blinders to the obstacles she faced.

"There may be signals out there that tell me I can't do this, but I'm not going to recognize them," Tilghman said. "Adrenaline is a great hormone."