Women Left Off Harvard's Dean List

Neil. Harvey. Jeremy, Kim, Peter, Bryan, Jerome, Joseph, Robert, Joseph, Bruce, Venkatesh and Barry.

Subtract Radcliffe Institute Dean Mary Maples Dunn's name from the list of Harvard's top officials, and in one way 1999 might as well be 1699. All the names are male.

Harvard's top deanships and administrative positions have traditionally been dominated by men. Before Dunn's appointment this year, only one woman had served as dean of a graduate school.

In recent years, women have made huge gains at the lower levels of University administration. Women now hold administrative positions including the vice president of finance, the vice president of administration and the university's general counsel.

Women also sit on Harvard's most important governing body, the Harvard Corporation, as well as the Board of Overseers, but they meet infrequently.

And among those high officials who lead the University directly and present Harvard's face to its students and the outside world, men still predominate.

Though President Neil L. Rudenstine has emerged as an advocate of affirmative action and diversity in higher education, no woman has taken office at the dean level or higher during his tenure.

Harvard's problem, officials say, goes back to a lack of women among tenured faculty nationwide.

The University's top brass is always drawn from the ranks of tenured professors, and so a shortage of tenured women keeps Harvard's glass ceiling in place.

Acknowledging the Problem

Harvard's central administrators are the first ones to admit that the gender imbalance is a problem.

Associate Vice President James S. Hoyte '65--who deals with affirmative action and equal-opportunity issues-- says the University is not where it wants to be on this issue.

"The proof is in the pudding--we don't have any results here," he says.

The problem is especially acute, Hoyte says, in light of Harvard's efforts to recruit a diverse student body.

"Clearly the students should have the benefits of a diverse set of perspectives from the faculty and the leadership of the faculty," he says.

According to Hoyte, Rudenstine is dedicated to the effort of creating a gender balance.

"The fact that there aren't any [women] doesn't tell the whole story," Rudenstine says.

Rudenstine says that, in several searches for new deans, women have made it onto his short list but not gotten an offer.

"We care very much about women and minority representation, " Rudenstine says. "We take it into account at every stage [of hiring deans]."

In fact, in 1992 Rudenstine did offer the deanship of the Graduate School of Education to a woman, Columbia Teacher's College professor Linda Darling-Hammond.

Darling-Hammond first accepted the position, but turned it down before taking office.

"It would have been a good appointment," Rudenstine says.

Provost Harvey Fineberg says the University can only help itself by correcting the gender imbalance.

"The problem becomes how much emphasis one is going to place on that effort," Hoyte says.

Women of Power

Within the lower rungs of the Harvard administration--those offices below the deans that make the University run day-to-day--women are better represented than ever before.

In fact, three of the University vice presidents are women and about half of all University administrative jobs are held by women.

Elizabeth C. "Beppie" Huidekoper, vice president for finance, says that Harvard's image as a male-dominated institution is not accurate.

"I think the perception of Harvard is so off--I am amazed," she says.

Huidekoper says that women and men at Harvard are not empowered as much by their job titles as they are by working in a collaborative way.

"This is a culture of building consensus," Huidekoper says. "Relationships matter enormously."

Huidekoper says that, within this consensus-centered framework, women have power as lower-level administrators..

"All of the senior people in Jeremy Knowles's office are women, for example," Dunn says.

But Kathy A. Spiegelman, Harvard's associate vice president for planning and real estate, says women's role in the administration needs to be complemented by a strong presence among tenured faculty.

Spiegelman says she can only do so much to change Harvard from her strictly administrative position.

"I must acknowledge that I sometimes experience a feeling of being marginalized," Spiegelman wrote in an e-mail message. "Since the leaders on the faculties are primarily male, my job as a woman administrator has an extra challenge."

How to Pick a Dean

The roots of Harvard's shortage of women in top University positions lie in the dean-selection process.

This April, after Divinity School Dean Ronald F. Thiemann left the University, President Neil L. Rudenstine began Harvard's most recent dean search.

While he's no expert in theological studies, Rudenstine knows how to hunt for administrators. He relies on the input of a "cabinet" of advisors to supplement his own requirements.

A slew of consultants helps out from within Harvard and across the country.

Rudenstine places ads in various academic publications. He quizzes alumni, colleagues and faculty on what they envision as the school's future. From a pool of 100, he whittles down the list to a select few. He schmoozes.

Rudenstine's choice for the Divinity School post was professor J. Bryan Hehir, who performs the duties of dean as well as other functions.

His appointment was a step toward diversity--Hehir is the first Roman Catholic to lead the Divinity School. But out of the 14 people who have headed the Divinity School since 1819, according to the school's news office, none have been women.

Hehir, like his colleagues on Rudenstine's Dean's Council, was a tenured faculty member before his appointment.

Traditionally, far less women than men have held tenured positions nationwide--and thus, officials say, the chances of finding a qualified candidate who is also a woman are often limited.

Behind the Experience

Harvard's only female dean was Patricia Albjerg Graham, who headed the Graduate School of Education from 1981 to 1991.

Graham says women are treated far differently now at Harvard than when she arrived as a postdoctoral student in 1972.

"I couldn't go through the front door of the Faculty Club, nor eat in the main dining room," she says.

To his credit, she adds, one of the first thing then-Harvard President Derek C. Bok did was to change that policy.

"I wouldn't have stayed unless treated equally," she says.

In 1974, she became a professor at Harvard. She was told, upon receiving tenure, that she was the 13th Harvard woman ever with that status.

Graham subsequently rose through the ranks to become dean of the Radcliffe Institute--now the Bunting Institute--a position in which she served from 1974-77.

She was then the vice president of Radcliffe College before accepting the GSE post. In 1981, Bok asked her to be GSE's dean. Graham now serves as Warren professor of history of American education.

Without women in its highest offices, "Harvard has missed some extremely good candidates in its last 300-some years," Graham says.

While the University as a whole is known for its low number of tenured women, GSE is the closest to achieving gender balance.

According to the 1997-1998 edition of the Harvard University Factbook, over 35 percent of GSE's tenured faculty are women. Graham stresses that this can't be explained away by arguments that education is a "women's field."

The next highest Harvard school in terms of tenured women is the School of Design--with about 26 percent.

Younger women who want to move through the faculty ranks into administration should talk to the older women who have already done it, she says. A woman may lead Harvard in the not-so-distant future, she adds.

"I think it could be quite soon... Persons of color and white women now have access...that's all happened in my lifetime," she says. "These institutions are drawing on a broader range of talent than they were before."

First in the League

Problems with women ascending to the top ranks of university administrations are not confined to Harvard.

"One does often see that women are the assistant X or the associate X," says S. Georgia Nugent, associate provost of Princeton.

Still, Harvard has not done as well as other schools in appointing women to the very top positions.

"I think 'elite' universities are probably lagging a bit--we're not the best among our cohort of schools," Hoyte says.

Judith Rodin at the University of Pennsylvania was the Ivy League's first female president, named in 1993. Prior to arriving in Philadelphia, she was Yale's provost. One former University of Chicago president, Hanna H. Gray, also served as Yale's provost.

Yale's current provost, Alison F. Richard, says, "In terms of the administration, Yale does very well in having a balance--it starts right at the top."

Nugent says there has been a "fairly strong presence" of women at high levels of the administration there as well.

The dean of Princeton College is female, a recent dean of the faculty was also a woman and a number of associate provosts are female.

Although Princeton has had no female or minority presidents, Nugent believes it's only a matter of time.

As far as picking new administrators, "we try to monitor that the original diversity of the pool remains constant through the process," she says. "We're obviously always trying to find the most qualified person, but we are always maintaining the diversity of our campus."