Yale Hiring Report Released

Yale University should take a number of initiatives over the next 10 years to increase its low numbers of minority faculty and expand the pool of minority scholars overall, a Yale faculty committee said this week.

The 12-member panel concluded 20 months of deliberations Monday by issuing a report calling on the university to establish numerical 10-year affirmative action targets. A Harvard faculty committee issued a similar report on minority and women faculty in March, but it explicitly rejected numerical hiring goals or targets.

"Of greatest concern," the Yale report says, is that "Yale is close to the bottom, and never exceeds midrange compared to the other institutions, for nearly all minority-group categories."

Currently, 5.7 percent of Yale's tenured faculty are members of ethnic minority groups, and 8.8 percent of its junior faculty are minorities, according to the Yale report. In Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, minorities compose 7 percentof the tenured faculty and 12.1 percent of thejunior professors.

Among the 23 recommendations made by the Yalecommittee are the establishment of a visitingminority professor program to provide "mentors"for potential minority academics and the creationof a standing committee to monitor departments'affirmative action efforts. The proposals must beapproved by Yale University President Benno C.Schmidt before they can be formally adopted.

Schmidt told The Yale Daily News this week thatthe report "strikes an appropriate note of graveconcern about the situation and about thedifficulty of quick and substantial programs,given the realities of the problem of availableapplicants."

The Yale committee was chaired by Professor ofPsychology Judith Rodin, who turned down theRadcliffe presidency last year.

The panel said that over the next 10 years,Yale should increase its number of tenuredminorities to 8 percent and its number of juniorfaculty to 14 percent.

The committee's target numbers actually callfor a smaller increase in minority scholars thanYale has seen in the last 10 years, according toThe Yale Daily News. The report attributes themodest targets to the small pool of minorityacademics and an unwillingness to hire tenuredfaculty simply "by raiding our fellowinstitutions."

Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba'53, who chaired Harvard's committee onaffirmative action, said that his panel had shiedaway from numerical recruiting goals because ofthe inherent uncertainty in hiring trends.

"If you set very precise targets, often peopledon't meet them, and then people become cynical,"Verba said in an interview.

The Harvard report emphasized bureaucraticchanges and the appointment of a new associatedean of the faculty for affirmative action toexpedite affirmative action efforts.

Yale senior Beatrice O. Sibblies,co-coordinator of the Black Student Alliance, saidthat minority students at Yale had been callingfor implementation of many of the report'sproposals for years. She said the recommendationscould be effective if Schmidt backs it strongly.

"We are taking hope," Sibblies said. "It's timefor a change.