Task Forces Brief Faculty Council

The Faculty Council met Wednesday with members of the two faculty task forces on women, lauding the committees’ two newly released reports but cautioning that more budgetary and legislative hurdles must be overcome if the reports’ recommendations are to be implemented successfully in the long term.

Professors and administrators who attended Wednesday’s meeting emphasized yesterday that the 10-year, $50 million initiative that University President Lawrence H. Summers announced on Monday was only a first step.

“The level of investment that it will take to increase the number of women scientists and women engineers is surely many times this, but this is a very powerful first statement,” said Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby, who chairs the Faculty Council, the 18-member governing board of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

Summers himself has cast the initiative to address the underrepresentation of women in science as only the beginning of a long-term effort to enhance diversity on the faculty.

“This is an initial commitment,” Summers told The Crimson on Tuesday, adding that “there are likely to be more resources that are allotted down the road.”

Many of the task forces’ recommendations—including paid maternity leave, a new senior vice provost for diversity, and 40 new faculty appointments prioritizing “women and underrepresented minorities”—would indeed require significant funding.

Professor of the History of Science and council member Everett I. Mendelsohn said the initiative is a symbolic step that needs to be built on.

“It was more a gesture than a studied budgetary response,” he said. “The worry everyone else has, of course, is that five million dollars a year for 10 years is not a lot of money for a university like Harvard.”

Another Faculty Council member, Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature Judith Ryan, said that FAS must take action in order to make the task forces’ reports locally effective.

“The important thing now is that these recommendations be converted into actual legislation that will be functional in the FAS faculty,” Ryan said, “because the task forces were University-wide, but now we have to create recommendations and legislation that will really pertain to FAS specifically.”

Ryan added that among the task force members who attended Wednesday’s council meeting—Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies Evelynn M. Hammonds, Higgins Professor of Natural Science Barbara J. Grosz, Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Drew Gilpin Faust, and five other professors—“there was a range of optimism, from cautious optimism to very strong optimism.”

One of the other five professors at the meeting was Dean for the Physical Sciences Venkatesh “Venky” Narayanamurti, who served on the Task Force on Women in Science and Engineering.

“Everybody right now is enthusiastic and optimistic,” Venky said, calling the $50 million initiative “a good first step.” But he added that “exactly what would be the right amount of money still has to be quantified.”

Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics Howard Georgi ’67, who co-chaired the undergraduate working group of that task force and also attended Wednesday’s meeting, was more blunt.

“We are hoping for a culture change that will improve the University (and the academy in general) for everyone,” he wrote in an e-mail. “This is a very ambitious goal and [$50 million] doesn’t sound like so much in that context.”

In interviews yesterday, Faculty Council members applauded the task forces for their speedily written reports and said that the controversy surrounding Summers earlier this year was pivotal in accelerating efforts to enhance faculty diversity.

“The current initiative would not have emerged with the strength it has had there not been that serious mistake,” Mendelsohn said, referring to Summers’ controversial January comments on women in science. “Will it therefore succeed? That’s not clear yet. We’ll know that only when the pieces are put in place.”

In other business, the Faculty Council on Wednesday briefly discussed establishing additional council subcommittees—specifically to examine the University’s plans for developing its Allston property.

“Obviously the University has committees working on Allston, but they don’t report directly to the Faculty Council,” Ryan said. “So we hear about progress and decisions pertaining to Allston only occasionally, when more or less the Dean decides that we should hear about it.”

The council also considered establishing its own subcommittee on women and minorities. But council members disagreed, Ryan said, “whether one should multiply the number of committees working on these topics.”

At present, the Faculty Council has only two subcommittees: one each on graduate and undergraduate education.

—Staff writer Anton S. Troianovski can be reached at atroian@fas.harvard.edu.