By Emily GlazerThe Daily Northwestern

The official announcement of this year’s tenure appointments on Thursday has given new life to old arguments that Northwestern discriminates against women when granting tenure to faculty members.

The issue came to light when news spread last week that religion Prof. Sarah Taylor did not receive tenure, sparking an outcry from students and faculty who said she more than meets qualifications. Taylor’s supporters said gender discrimination is at the forefront of the decision to deny her tenure, but some administrators disagree.

“Of course Northwestern does not discriminate against females or anyone else,” NU President Henry Bienen wrote in an e-mail from Croatia on Thursday.

In 1981 former sociology Prof. Janet Lever filed a lawsuit against the university, charging that gender discrimination prevented her from receiving a tenured or permanent position at NU as an associate professor.

Lever’s case was not unique, and in 2000, University Provost Lawrence Dumas revived the university’s Faculty Diversity Committee, saying that increasing the number of women and under-represented minorities in faculty positions should be a priority for NU.

Seven years later, the numbers are still skewed.

an issue of gender?

NU ranked ninth out of the 11 Big Ten schools in the male-to-female ratio of tenured faculty, according to a 2006 study from the American Association of University Professors. It ranked last on a list of 11 “similar universities,” which included Brown and Dartmouth universities and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Although 35 percent of NU’s tenure-track faculty were women, only 23 percent of faculty members granted tenure were female, according to the study.

In other male-to-female ratio categories, such as full-time faculty, tenure-track faculty and full professor status, NU ranked no higher than seventh in the Big Ten. Among the 11 “similar universities,” NU ranked no higher than tenth.

But Jean Shedd, associate provost for budget, facilities and analysis, said NU could not be compared to other Big Ten schools or even the schools on the list of “similar universities.”

“(NU’s) peers tend to be … institutions like Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins, as opposed to some of the smaller institutions and state institutions that are on these lists,” she said.

However, Shedd said NU “could be doing better at recruiting women.”

She cited the reinstitution of the Faculty Diversity Committee, where annual reports are published “to monitor the numbers of women and under-represented minorities and how we do in recruiting them.”

Shedd said there has been progress, but she thinks NU “would say it would like it to be quicker” at achieving desired results.

Critics of the tenure system cite a number of reasons for gender bias. Some say the dominance of men in the upper echelons of academia naturally leads to discrimination. Others say the disparity is caused by gender roles at home – specifically the balance for a woman of raising a family and fulfilling tenure requirements.

John Margolis, NU’s associate provost for faculty affairs, said he was “aware of no evidence that would suggest that there is any bias based on gender in the promotion and tenure review process.”

But Prof. Donna Leff, the only female tenured professor on the editorial side of the Medill School of Journalism and a former Daily editor in chief, said she was not surprised by the statistics.

Leff, who has had tenure since 1985, is one of three women in Medill with tenure, compared with the 14 tenured males in the school.

“It’s not surprising to me that we have a dearth of tenured women because I don’t think the climate is particularly hospitable to women,” Leff said.

Although she said she was unfamiliar with Taylor’s case, she stressed that the low number of female tenured faculty at NU could be a result of “life issues,” particularly the lack of child care on the Evanston campus.

Margolis said the administration is aware of this problem and hopes to improve campus child care facilities in the near future.

He also said NU recently introduced a Faculty Family Leave Policy, allowing female professors one quarter off after childbirth or adoption, and an additional quarter for both male and female professors for child rearing. He added that mothers automatically get a one-year extension on the “tenure clock,” a time period allotted to professors to complete specifications for tenure review.

This plan was “quite progressive in comparison to offerings at other institutions,” Margolis said.

Despite Leff’s opposition to NU’s lack of lifestyle support for women, she said she thinks there is not “blatant discrimination” regarding tenure.

“Whatever gender discrimination exists at Northwestern is much subtler than just denying someone tenure at the end of the day, ” Leff said.

But Leff remains on the other side of the equation – a professor who already has tenure.

Student Protest

Students at NU have expressed their outrage after word spread of Taylor’s tenure denial.

They started a letter-writing campaign and formed a Facebook group to voice their protests. Lauren Buchholtz, a Weinberg freshman and creator of the Facebook group, said the wait list to get into Taylor’s Introduction to Native American Religions class is long, and her CTEC evaluations are “fantastic.”

Taylor taught two classes this quarter: Introduction to Native American Religions and African American Religions.

Taylor’s CTEC evaluations for her most recent Introduction to Native American Religions course in 2001 ranged from 5.1 to 5.6 out of a possible score of six, with a response rate of more than 90 percent. For her last African American Religions class in 2005, CTEC evaluations ranged from 4.7 to 5.1 from about 73 percent of the students enrolled in the course.

With Spring Quarter coming to a close, Buchholtz said Introduction to Native American Religions is the best class she has taken at NU.

“It’s not just names, dates and places, but everything that goes behind it,” Buchholtz said. “She has a really specific, particular, unique wealth of knowledge that is especially salient and valuable today.”

Buchholtz said she thought the announcement was timed so that the issue would “fade in the background and in students’ minds.”

In 2004, the American Association of University Women cited NU as an example of universities using delay tactics against gender discriminatory lawsuits.

And in spite of her attempt to sue NU in 1981, Lever said she never got the chance to prove her case in court.

“We fought for 13 years, and they eliminated it from court on a technicality,” she said.

Lever said a different set of standards was applied when she taught at NU. She said her gender class began at 40 students and reached 400 by the time she left NU, but she said the subject’s legitimacy was not recognized.

“Let’s face it – the boys didn’t get it and they probably still don’t,” she said.

Margolis told The Daily in 2004 that he has no recollection of the lawsuit. He said the tenure-review process generally occurs during a full academic year.

“It is an important decision that is being made and it’s important that the best decision be made carefully and not hastily,” he said.

Other schools, such as Princeton University, make tenure announcements as early as February. Margolis said it is possible this difference is due to NU’s quarter system.

The Tenure Process

Laura Colee, a Weinberg sophomore enrolled in both of Taylor’s classes this quarter, said before she was aware of the organized student protest, she sent an e-mail to Weinberg Dean Dan Linzer.

Colee said Linzer replied, saying it was valuable to hear from her. But Colee added that tenure is “such a politically-loaded process that everyone involved has to be very careful with.”

“Tenure reviews are confidential and I therefore cannot discuss these matters,” Linzer wrote in an e-mail to The Daily on Wednesday.

Margolis said the details of a tenure review vary from school to school at NU.

“But every school has processes in place to ensure that this enormously important decision is made wisely,” he said.

According to the Faculty Handbook, tenure procedures begin with a dossier of a faculty member, which goes to a faculty committee for a vote. The dossier then goes to the dean of the school, who can pass it along to the provost or turn it down. The provost then passes it along to the university president and then to the Board of Trustees, each of whom has the power to turn down the candidate.

Though Taylor was denied tenure, she said she is in the process of submitting her case to the appeals board.

The appeals process is lengthy as well. According to the appeals guidelines, an elected faculty group reviews members on three grounds: inadequate consideration, academic freedom violation and impermissible discrimination.

Margolis specifically pointed out one section of the document that stated, “(The ad hoc panel) will not substitute its judgment on the academic merits of the appellant for that of the appropriate review bodies.”

Taylor’s Qualifications

Taylor’s doctorate in Religion and American Culture with an emphasis in Women’s Studies is not commonly found in academia.

Colee said the classes Taylor teaches would be “lost if she were to leave.”

Colee, a religion major, is one of two religion department representatives on the Student Advisory Board and a member of the Undergraduate Religion Committee. She said the religion department also does not have another African American religions professor.

Harvard University religion Prof. Robert Orsi said most departments of religion around the country recognize that they’d like someone to teach Native American religions. Orsi wrote a blurb on the back of Taylor’s book, “Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology,” published in April by Harvard University Press.

Orsi, who said he will be coming to NU in the fall with a joint appointment in history and religious studies, added that at any major university “there has to be an African American religions class.”

Orsi said he thought Taylor is “eminently qualified as a professor.”

“I was astonished that she was denied tenure because she has abundantly met every standard for tenure at a Big Ten university and beyond,” he said. “I’ve seen people at Harvard tenured with less than she has.”

Taylor has held a number of prestigious fellowships and awards and has published articles in a variety of journals. Closer to home, Taylor won the Weinberg Award for Outstanding Freshman Adviser in 2001-02 and was named to the Faculty Honor Roll.

“If a teacher with those credentials can’t get tenure because she’s a woman, who can?” Buchholtz said.

Reach Emily Glazer at [email protected].