On Female Faculty, Progress Is Slow But Steady
A meeting of the Stanford Faculty Senate is not exactly the hottest ticket in the Bay Area. But a crowd packed a Law School auditorium on May 13, when Provost Condoleezza Rice gave her annual update on the status of women faculty.
Questions about the dearth of female professors have grown increasingly persistent in recent years. In "Wanted: Female Faculty" (March/April), writer Yvonne Daley outlined Stanford's recruiting efforts and detailed the dispute over using affirmative action to diversify Stanford's teaching and research corps.
Rice's report showed slow but steady progress. In the last five years, the proportion of women faculty has grown from 15.8 percent to 19 percent. Likewise, a 1974 to 1991 analysis indicated that a higher percentage of women (45 percent) than men (38 percent) received tenure. Rice also crunched Stanford's numbers the way the U.S. Department of Labor does to determine if the University is making a good-faith effort to hire a diverse workforce. That so-called "utilization analysis" showed Stanford employed appropriate numbers of women in 22 of 26 job categories.
Stanford's critics weren't appeased. "The number of women faculty in this room is one clear indication that these issues are of broad concern," said Laura Carstensen, director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, speaking on behalf of the steering committee of the Faculty Women's Caucus. "We are improving, but our competition is improving as fast or faster."
Meanwhile, Karen Sawislak, an assistant professor of history whose tenure denial in 1997 served as a lightning rod for protests on the issue of faculty diversity, has found a new calling -- the law. The labor historian had been on a one-year leave at Harvard, mulling Stanford's invitation to resubmit her tenure application. Instead she'll enter UC-Berkeley's law school this fall and focus on employment and labor issues.
For Hoover Archivist, Art Imitates Life
International intrigue, a middle-age scholar, a treasure trove of Soviet documents. The building blocks of Archangel, a thriller by British novelist Robert Harris, sounded pretty familiar to Charles Palm, the Hoover Institution's chief archivist. And they should. As described in "Cracking the Kremlin Files" (May/June), it was Palm, '66, who masterminded Hoover's acquisition of 25 million pages of Communist Party archives. In real life, the material is being mined by scholars in search of insights into Soviet history. In Harris's fictionalized takeoff, the hero, Fluke Kelso, attends a conference on the Hoover archive project only to be drawn into a living web of Stalinist terror. Says Palm: "Real life wasn't anything like that."
