New report criticizes Ivy hiring

Members of several graduate student unions delivered a report critical of race and gender equity in Ivy League faculty to the offices of President Tilghman and other Ivy League heads Tuesday.

The report, titled "The (Un)Changing Face of the Ivy League," argues that women and people of color are grossly underrepresented in Ivy League faculties and doctoral programs, suggesting that hiring disparities persist among underrepresented groups.

"The goal is to begin a dialogue about the fact that the Ivy League has remained an elitist institution," said Melissa Stuckey '00, one of the students who presented the report. "Women and people of color have had difficulty getting the highest tenure-track and tenured faculty positions."

President Tilghman was not present to receive the report from Stuckey and Judd Greenstein, a graduate student at Princeton.

The report was prepared by the Graduate Employee and Student Organization (GESO) at Yale University in association with graduate student unions at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, Associate Dean of Gender Equity Joan Girgus is preparing a 10-year analysis of women faculty in the humanities and social sciences that she hopes to release by the end of the year.

"What we are trying to do is to create situations in which people are year in and year out, in an extremely steady way, thinking about the possibilities for hiring women faculty," Girgus said.

A task force examined the status of women in the natural sciences and engineering at Princeton from 1992 to 2002.

"I think everyone believed that even though you can see the progress over this 10-year task force, it was slow progress," Girgus said.

Girgus said the task force decided not to perform an Ivy-wide analysis. "We considered whether to gather comparative data, but decided not do so because we were interested in how Princeton was doing absolutely," she said.

According to the GESO report, black scholars accounted for only three percent of new tenure-track faculty at Ivy League institutions in 2003; less than two percent of these high-level hires were Hispanic.

"Black and Hispanic Ph.D.s were four times more likely to get hired into non-ladder positions than into tenure-track positions," the report stated. "In comparison, white Ph.D.s were only 2.5 times more likely to get hired into non-ladder jobs."

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Women have much higher — but still disproportionately low — success rates in acquiring tenure-track positions in the Ivy League, according to the report.

"The low representation of women and minorities is obvious to anyone who enters the academy," Greenstein said.

Non-tenure track faculty, such as lecturers and adjunct professors, typically receive lower salaries, fewer health benefits and less time to write and research, Stuckey said.