Women in the Spotlight

For Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the semester that ends today was a time of ferment for one of the toughest higher-education issues of the decade: the role of women in the faculty.

The issue was dramatically spotlighted on three separate fronts in the last four months:

In October an official survey revealed that sexual harassment within the faculty is surprisingly widespread.

More than a third of all female students and faculty members had been sexually harassed by people with authority over them.

A month before the survey came the news of the most serious incident publicized to date of sexual harassment by a Harvard faculty member. In September, professors confirmed that Jorge I. Dominguez, a tenured government scholar, was officially punished over the summer by Rosovsky for sexually harassing a junior faculty member of the department.

The survey attracted nationwide attention and raised awareness of the issue on campus to an unprecedented level. It also prompted an official proposal for a comprehensive new policy for handling complaints of sexual harassment. Under the plan. Faculty administrators would create a new quasi-independent clearing house for all disputes concerning any sort of harassment.

November and December brought news of three tenure promotions for women in Harvard's junior faculty: Hindu-Religion scholar Diana L. Eck. Biochemist Nancy R. Kleckner, and French-literature specialist Susan R. Suleiman.

The low quotient of women in the ranks of tenured Faculty members--currently 17 out of about 350--has long been a source of bitter criticism from many Harvard teachers and students.

But this fall's trio of promotions represented a significant percentage of the 10 or 12 tenure appointments the Faculty usually makes each year. In that light they looked like harbingers of better odds for women's chances of gaining prestigious lifetime posts at Harvard.

Harvard took significant steps over the fall towards hiring its first tenured professor specifically to teach and research in the area of women's studies.

Currently, the field is represented in the Faculty only by an interdisciplinary committee of professors from other departments whose chief purpose is to keep track of courses that include topics in women's studies (It offers only one course of its own.)

The move to appoint a professor with half-time duties in the committee (and half-time in another department) was seen as a critical step towards legitimating women's studies throughout the Faculty and sparring further programs in the area.

Three department--Anthropology English, and Psychology--took up Rosovsky's offer to compete for the appointment, the results of which are expected to be announced in the spring.

Administrators and professors say the three developments coincided more by chance than by a single wide-ranging effort this fall to improve the lot of women in the Faculty. The issues of sexual harassment, tenuring women, and women's studies, they point out, have all been percolating on Faculty agenda for several years. "I don't think there was a scheme to make this the year of the woman," says John R. Marquand, assistant dean of the College.

Moreover, the fall's advances appear to be the confluence of various outside pressures, not a unified drive from witching University Hall.

The harassment survey came about after tightened federal regulations and two episodes of previous years, in which Harvard instructors were disciplined for harassing students made the issue impossible for administrators to ignore.

The tenure appointment followed a nationwide increase in the number of women pursing careers as professors. "We're seeing the great wave of women who entered graduate school in the late 60s come up for tenure for the first time now," says Nancy Maull, a Faculty administrator who monitors affirmative action.

And the women's studies search came at the tail-end of a great rise in the area's prominence in American universities. "The field is much more developed at other universities than it is here," says one professor. "Harvard's been a little late in coming to it."

Some observers suggested the autumn's good news about women may also have concealed a measure of bad news. Says Elizabeth Young '85, the outgoing president of the Radcliffe Union of Students: "It's great to have a survey of sexual harassment but look what its showed." The report, says Young, "proved definitively how serious a problem harassment is and how inadequately it's been addressed."

Among the survey's most starting statistics: 49 percent of all female junior faculty members reported experiencing sexual harassment, including 17 percent who reported explicit or physical advances.

Others cautioned against taking too much encouragement from the fall's tenure figures. Nathan I. Huggins, chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department, suggests that Harvard tenures so few professors each year that isolating any single year's statistics can be misleading. "It may be another decade before another woman is promoted to tenure," he says.

And Marlyn M. Lewis '70, the assistant dean of the College responsible for a wide range of women's issues, says the Faculty still has a long way to go before it "really represents some spectrum of the country" in its quotient of tenured women.

Officials say Harvard's long-term goal is to mirror the national pool of women with Ph.D's in its tenured ranks. Currently about 25 percent of the nation's advanced-degree holders are women, an all-time high. But because of Harvard's slow pace of filling tenured slots, the Faculty won't be able to reflect that statistic for at least 30 years, says Lewis.

Associate Dean of the Faculty Phyllis Keller agrees. "There are certain practical realities--like the dean can't fire half the Faculty," she says.

Nevertheless to Lewis, the fall's various developments are not unrelated. "I think they're all part of something bigger," she says. "There's clearly a general change--that's been in the growing stages for a long time and is only now bearing fruit--as far as making Harvard belong to women."

The key to that goal is hiring more women in influential positions--especially tenured faculty posts, says Lewis. And although she points out that Harvard has decades of work ahead of it in this effort, she argues that right now, "women are caring about Harvard and feeling full members of the place more so than even five years ago."

The influence of women on the Faculty, she says, can be seen in such diverse areas as the new parity women's athletic teams have reached in official financial support and widening access for women scholars in the hard sciences.

Like Lewis, the RUS's Young links the fall's news about women. "There's definitely a common factor," she says, "There issues are often fragmented but it's important to put them all together. Together, these advances indicating how much further there is to go."