Wanted: Female Faculty

Karen Sawislak was at home in San Francisco getting ready for a busy week of classes when she got the call from Norman Naimark, the chair of Stanford’s history department. “I’ve heard from the dean, ” he said softly. Two years later, Sawislak still remembers his exact words: “In your case, it’s not good news.”

An assistant professor and specialist in 19th-century social and urban history, Sawislak was not exactly stunned to hear that she had been denied tenure. After all, she said in an interview this winter, winning tenure at Stanford is reserved for scholars deemed to be among the best in the world. Still, she had good reason to hope. In the first phase of the tenure process, she had received nearly unanimous approval from her department, with 26 faculty members voting for tenure and one abstaining. Then the appointments and promotions committee of the School of Humanities and Sciences had recommended tenure 5 to 1.

But as Naimark informed her in that April 1997 phone call, Sawislak had not made it through the third hoop: the dean of Humanities and Sciences had decided against her. In a letter to Sawislak, then-dean John B. Shoven said he found her work “narrow ” and “not… path-setting ” and added that her scholarly productivity was “substantially below the norm. ”

Sawislak decided to appeal Shoven’s decision. For the next 19 months the case wound through the University’s elaborate grievance process, making headlines along the way. Last April a student and faculty demonstration drew about 80 supporters who demanded tenure for Sawislak – and more women faculty in general. By December, the appeal had reached President Gerhard Casper’s desk. In a December 9 letter to Sawislak, Casper called her case “unique ” and acknowledged that she had been given bad advice by history department colleagues on the importance of scholarship and publication. He offered her an unusual opportunity: she could start the tenure process all over.

Sawislak isn’t sure she has the energy. “It’s completely overwhelming, ” she says from Harvard University, where she’s on a yearlong fellowship. “This has turned into something that’s about much bigger issues than my tenure case. I’ve been caught up in a struggle over power and image and an effort to show that the system is fair when many of us believe it is extremely subjective and often, as I believe in my case, biased against women.”

At one level, the Sawislak case is unremarkable, a dispute between a faculty member and a large university over a lifetime employment decision. These sorts of tenure battles have grown increasingly common across the nation. But during the last year, Sawislak’s grievance has come to stand for a broader issue: the relative lack of women faculty at Stanford and other elite universities. Indeed, Sawislak supporters have skillfully transformed her case into a campaign, staging demonstrations, writing op-eds and forming the Faculty Women’s Caucus to press the issues in public.

The numbers tell part of the story. About 18 percent of Stanford’s 1,534-member faculty are women, and female professors make up 14.5 percent of tenured faculty. Among 21 comparable universities – selective schools and Pac-10 institutions – Stanford ranked 19th in its percentage of women faculty, according to a 1993 report by the provost’s office. (That ranking remains essentially unchanged today.) The shortage of women is especially noticeable at the highest levels. Of the seven schools that make up the University, all are headed by men – although searches are underway at the Law and Business schools, where the deans are stepping down. Ten of the 67 department chairs are women, and 17 of the 237 holders of endowed chairs are women. A notable exception: the University’s No. 2 executive, the person in charge of academic and budget affairs, is Provost Condoleezza Rice.

“There aren’t any easy solutions to these problems,” Rice said in an interview with the Stanford News Service last year. “I’d be the first to say I’d like to do this more quickly.” But there are obstacles to speed, she says. For starters, there aren’t that many openings at Stanford. Only 102 new faculty members were hired in 1996-97 (the most recent year available). Twenty-nine of them were women. Given that most of the faculty is white and male – and that mandatory retirement came to an end in 1993 – the percentages are difficult to budge. Even when tenure positions come open, it can be almost impossible to find qualified women in some fields. This so-called pipeline problem is especially acute in certain areas of science and engineering.

And then there is the question of affirmative action. The University is firmly committed to using affirmative action tools – outreach, aggressive recruiting, subtle benefits-of-the-doubt – when hiring junior faculty. But it is just as firmly opposed to group-based preferences at the tenure stage. The debate, then, is not about whether or when to start using affirmative action, but when to stop. For Rice, there’s a philosophical line in the sand. “I don’t believe in and will not apply affirmative action at the time of tenure,” she told the Faculty Senate last May during a tense debate over the issue of female faculty. “It will be a slippery slope if people believe a woman’s case passes if it’s borderline, and a man’s case doesn’t. It would be a mistake.”

In February of this year, Casper echoed those words at yet another Faculty Senate meeting. “It is long-standing Stanford policy that at the point of hiring assistant professors we practice affirmative action,” he said. “But at the point of tenure decision, the candidate faces evaluation entirely as an individual; at Stanford, she or he is not competing against any other candidate for the tenure position, and there is no room for anything but a judgment of the individual’s merit.”

Casper’s comments came two days after word leaked that the U.S. Labor Department was looking into Stanford’s hiring and promotion of female faculty. At issue is the University’s compliance with federal affirmative action rules. (As a recipient of more than $500 million in annual federal grants and research support, Stanford is subject to rules requiring all contractors to implement affirmative action programs.) Rice’s views on preferences in tenure decisions “contain the suggestion that she doesn’t believe in affirmative action programs and the University didn’t have one,” Gary Buff, a Labor Department attorney, told the San Jose Mercury News. “If that’s the case, that’s a potential violation” of regulations requiring all contractors to adopt goals and timetables for hiring women and minorities.

The prospect of a federal inquiry underscores the tricky position that Stanford, like other universities, finds itself in. Better have an affirmative action plan or government regulators will pounce. But if you go too far, the courts may find you guilty of reverse discrimination. Casper alluded to the problem in his February statement. “The delicate task that we face is how to satisfy the competing legal mandates that the government has set up for us if we endeavor to use other, nonpreferential, means of assuring equal opportunity. The laws Congress has passed, the regulations the executive branch has issued and the rulings the courts have made are often hard to reconcile with one another, let alone with various state laws and regulations.”

In a university where the power to hire is spread among seven schools and dozens of departments, it’s not easy to alter the demographics of the faculty. But that’s one of the things Law School professor Robert Weisberg is charged with doing. While his official title is vice provost for faculty relations, Weisberg likes to think of himself as “the fix-it guy.” His role – along with Anne Fernald, an associate professor of psychology and vice provost for faculty development – is to encourage academic departments to aggressively recruit women and minorities.

Weisberg was appointed to the post by Rice in the wake of a 1993 report on women faculty. Written by a committee named by the provost, the report found that Stanford was “seriously lagging with respect to recruitment and retention.” At the time, 43 percent of Stanford departments had no tenured women and almost 40 percent of the departments that had hired new faculty in the previous five years had not selected a woman.

Weisberg seemed like a natural choice to address these issues. The School of Law, where he has been on the faculty since 1981, has been a leader in the recruitment of women. In the early 1970s, the Law School recognized that the number of women students had increased to more than 20 percent, yet there were no women on the faculty. The Law School began recruiting and hiring high-profile female lawyers – women like Barbara Babcock, Kathleen Sullivan and Deborah Rhode – who have gone on to achieve national prominence. Rice was hoping that Weisberg’s familiarity with steps taken by the Law School to attract these women would benefit the entire University.

Weisberg’s strategy includes holding seminars in which deans and department chairs can exchange ideas, information and success stories. He and Fernald track every stage of the hiring process, monitoring the trends across campus and following the progress of junior faculty as they become associate professors and prepare to go up for tenure. Significantly, they also control a special University account to aid departments trying to hire female and minority professors. The so-called affirmative action fund will pay for half a faculty slot, or billet. It’s designed to help free departments from budget constraints when they have identified a woman or minority scholar with outstanding credentials. But too few deans and department heads make use of these incentives, Weisberg says in an interview in his sparse office in the basement of Building 10. “It’s not because the money isn’t there. It’s because we’re not asked enough.”

Weisberg’s efforts have run up against some stubborn realities. Most of Stanford’s professors are white men. And only about 2 percent of the faculty retires each year. “If every faculty job that came open was filled by a woman, women would still not represent 40 percent of the faculty until the middle of the next century,” he says. As he told the Faculty Senate last spring, “Retirements don’t happen that often, and billet expansion doesn’t occur all that often. It’s quixotic to expect dramatic changes.”

But according to those pushing hardest for more female professors, the obstacles alone can’t be blamed for the stubborn dearth of women. “Stanford is an incredible can-do place,” says Babcock, the law professor and one of the leaders of the Faculty Women’s Caucus. “If something doesn’t get done here, it’s because we don’t want it to get done.”

The average faculty senate meeting draws about 50 professors and administrators for what are usually civilized discussions on University policy and academic affairs. But the scene inside the Law School auditorium last May 14 was anything but calm. The biggest turnout of senators in more than a year was getting ready to hear a report by the newly formed Faculty Women’s Caucus. Babcock got the meeting rolling: “There are many women – my friends, my sisters from all departments – sitting in the back silently here,” she said, turning to the two dozen or so visitors, most of them women, who ringed the back of the auditorium. “They wouldn’t be here if they didn’t have a sense of despair and crisis about the way things are in our University for women.”

That launched two hours of sometimes blistering debate over the caucus’s findings. Everybody in the room knew the basic statistics: the percentage of women faculty had risen slowly over the years (see sidebar). Women now make up about a fifth of the Stanford faculty and hold about 14 percent of the tenured positions. But Babcock and her colleagues said progress had been too slow. Referring to charts and graphs, they argued that the gains made in hiring and promoting women between the early 1970s and early 1990s had stalled. In the largest school, Humanities and Sciences, for example, the report said that 60 percent (28 of 47) of the women faculty members up for promotion between 1982 to 1993 were granted tenure, while only about 43 percent (57 of 133) of the men got tenure. But from 1993 to 1997, men exceeded women both in the numbers and percentages of successful tenure applications, with 8 of 18 women, or 44 percent, gaining tenure compared to 15 of 29, or 52 percent, of the men.

Rice disputed most of the conclusions Babcock and her colleagues drew. Using a series of overhead slides, the provost presented figures showing female faculty increases in every department. She said gains had been strong in some departments and schools, though she conceded “there are a fair number that are doing really pretty miserably, given possibilities out there.”

As for promotion, Rice said that over time and University-wide, tenure had been awarded to male and female faculty members at about the same rate. Among faculty up for tenure in the last five years, 50 percent of men and 51 percent of women were awarded tenure. “I want to say this as clearly as I can because a lot of the extrapolation from a few high-profile cases out there, I think, has sunk the morale of a lot of our junior faculty needlessly.” Progress, she predicted, would continue to be “steady but slow,” and eventually women would catch up.

The most contentious dispute at the Faculty Senate meeting that day in May flared over the University’s affirmative action policy and when it should come into play. Members of the Women’s Caucus insisted that the policy had changed under the administration of Rice and Casper, which began in 1993. Before that, caucus members insisted, it was common for women to be given the “benefit of the doubt” in cases where tenure decisions could go either way. Such an approach is still needed, caucus members said, to counter the unintentional and institutional disadvantages faced by women.

Rice disagreed vehemently – at the meeting and later in an exchange of letters in the weekly Stanford Report newspaper. She pointed out that she strongly favors affirmative action in recruiting and hiring. But, she argued, the policy written by then-dean of Humanities and Sciences Norman Wessells in 1985 rules out “separate standards of evaluation at the time of review of tenure.” Whatever informal practices might have happened in specific cases over the years, she said, “I cannot – and the University cannot – elevate to the level of policy statements of belief or practice made in the context of specific cases.”

Wessells, now a part-time professor at the University of Oregon in Eugene, acknowledges that his written policy bars separate standards of evaluation. But, he says, in the 1980s, “there was an understanding that you could take factors like gender and race into consideration at the time of tenure.” The situation today is ambiguous, Weisberg says. “There has not been a formal change. The University has never had a policy of using affirmative action at the time of tenure,” he says. “The bottom line is that the provost and president who run the University now don’t believe there should be.”

On April 23, about a month before the contentious Faculty Senate meeting, some 80 students, professors and lecturers gathered in White Plaza not only to protest Sawislak’s tenure denial but also to demand more women and minority faculty. Dressed in black and carrying a coffin draped with a sign that read “Diversity R.I.P.,” the group marched to a somber drumbeat through administration offices. The protesters said the Sawislak case crystallized many of the obstacles women face once they embark on the tenure track at Stanford.

“I don’t understand. Her teaching is excellent. Her research in labor history will change American history. Her commitment is unlike any I’ve ever known,” said one of the protesters, Gabriela Gonzalez, a graduate student in history. “Many of my peers came here under Karen’s mentorship; they will be left without that and without a labor historian if she leaves.” Indeed, members of the Women’s Caucus argue that tenure decisions should take into account the fact that female faculty have a heavier burden as advisers and mentors to women students, especially in departments like history or philosophy where there are so few women on the faculty compared to the number of female students. That obligation, in turn, cuts into the time available for the research, writing and publishing so crucial to impressing tenure committees, says history professor Estelle Freedman. By the same token, Freedman says, women on the junior faculty don’t get as much chance to share in the collegiality that exists among male faculty members at different levels. They aren’t asked as frequently to coauthor reviews or collaborate on research. With that kind of mentorship, young scholars get crucial insights into the expectations they’ll need to meet for tenure. Without it, they’re more likely to be in the dark.

Sawislak also exemplified another obstacle for women who want tenure, Freedman says: she specializes in an area outside the mainstream of traditional research. That makes women and minority scholars more likely to be the target for unconscious bias. Tenure committees, Freedman believes, are inherently more comfortable with established approaches and research methods. “What we want is for Stanford to have all kinds of women in all the disciplines,” Babcock says. “It’s broadening and empowering – not just for the women students or women professors, but for everyone.”

In an interview with Stanford, Rice says she accepts that woman faculty face an uphill climb to tenure. But so do men, she points out. On the whole, only about half of the professors, male and female, who go up for tenure actually get it. It’s naive, she says, to blame the administration – particularly her and Casper – in a University in which power is dispersed through many schools and departments. It’s up to the faculty, the deans and department heads to recruit faculty who will bolster the ranks of women and minorities, she says. And she balks at the notion that women must have other women as mentors to have a successful academic career. Her mentors were men, she says, and gender was not a factor in their ability to provide her with good advice. “I am myself a beneficiary of a Stanford strategy that took affirmative action seriously, that took a risk in taking a young PhD from the University of Denver,” Rice told the Faculty Senate in May. “The president of the University did, after all, appoint a 38-year-old black female professor provost who had never been a department chair.”

In December, Rice announced that she plans to step down as provost in June. She wants to take a leave of absence from her appointment as a professor of political science and work in the private sector on international economic and political reform. Among the frustrations she leaves behind, she said not long after announcing her departure, is the difficulty changing the faculty. “Diversifying a faculty at an elite university like this is just really hard,” Rice said.

The drive to boost the number of women faculty starts with recruiting. And Debra Satz, the sole tenured female professor in the 15-member philosophy department, worries that attracting women to Stanford may be getting tougher. She was the second woman ever to get tenure in her department. During the nine years Satz has been at Stanford, there have been as many as four women faculty members in philosophy. The others left because they were denied tenure.

But the department is now working hard to attract women. Satz chairs two search committees and is pushing to get women and minorities to apply for two jobs open in philosophy. This winter, as she set out to recruit candidates, Satz discovered to her dismay that some women in the pool of possible applicants have been following news of the Sawislak case and the disputes over the dearth of women faculty at Stanford – and they are worried that Stanford is unwelcoming. Satz wonders whether the brightest ones in many fields – those with attractive options elsewhere in academia – will choose not to come to Stanford. “I can honestly tell them there’s a strong network of support among women here,” she says. “But I would feel more comfortable if the University started making departments more accountable for their hiring and promotion practices.”

At Harvard, where she’s working on a second book, historian Sawislak is still weighing her options. If she returns to Stanford, she’ll be embarking on a familiar challenge: seeking tenure at a place where everyone agrees more women are needed.

Yvonne Daley, a frequent contributor to Stanford, writes and teaches in California and Vermont.