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Along with my colleagues I was honored to be present listening to reports from MIT's five schools on the status of women faculty. At our faculty meeting on March 18, 2002 to report on gender inequities, committee chairs and speakers addressed the difficulties of quantifying that most elusive qualitative entity, "the alienation and marginalization" of women and minority faculty.
What is the role of School Council in the experience of women and minority faculty at MIT? Indeed, what is School Council? A perusal of MIT's Policies and Procedures and the MIT directory yields no document written specifically about School Council and little information more allusive than this: "The Institute regards tenure as important to ensuring academic freedom in teaching, research, and extramural activity. A department and School make a career commitment when the award of tenure is recommended. The Institute as a whole, acting through the Academic Council and the Corporation, joins in this commitment when tenure is awarded" (3.2 Tenure Process, MIT Policies and Procedures). E-mail correspondence from Dean Philip Khoury of SHASS enumerates our School Council's activities and documents, all of which provide a chart of organizational procedures and particular actions, but no statement about School Council's role, the history and composition of its membership, the presence and consequences of its power:
"SHASS Council is directly involved in promotion and tenure of regular faculty and in the appointment and renewal process for advanced non-faculty teaching staff, in particular adjunct professors and senior lecturers. Council is also directly involved in the design of the School's faculty leave plan and in all major matters related to the HASS component of MIT's General Institute Requirement and the HASS-Communications-Intensive component of the new Communications Requirement. SHASS Council, of course, has specific documents that explain the promotion and tenure process and faculty leave policy, including family leaves, in the School, and it has generated documents that address specific HASS curriculum issues, including the HASS component of the new Communications Requirement."
Dean Robert Silbey of the School of Science notes: "From what I have learned talking to the other Deans, each school does things a bit differently. But the primary function of Science Council is to hear promotion and tenure cases. We rarely meet as a body on any other issue. We have a one-day retreat every year that focuses on some basic issue – hiring, budget, student support, etc."
A survey of some 200 faculty governance documents on the Internet depicts university tenure-and-appointment committees that are ad hoc or permanent with members elected by faculty vote or appointed by a dean or president, and each institution describes the norm of a separate and independently created body. MIT's procedures for awarding tenure appear to be different, and unique, precisely at the point where School Council enters the MIT process. Consider tenure, promotion and appointment in SHASS. A candidate (internal or external) is recommended by a department, vetted through "blind letters" usually within a comparative list of candidates and approved to go forward to School Council, a body consisting mainly of department heads and our School Dean. MIT department heads wield great power: we control, for example, space allocation, committee assignments, budgets, and we rank our faculty to determine relative salary increases, all factors that may determine whether women and minority faculty members become equal participants at the Institute. If that weren't enough, we heads also constitute a School's tenure-and-appointments committee.
Does MIT's School Council system of department heads contribute to MIT's excellence or does it facilitate the self-replication of white male professors? How does one counter a departmental head who announces at School Council that he is gender-blind, but somehow finds only one qualified senior woman faculty member for his large and nationally renowned department? Does MIT's high percentage of hiring its own Ph.Ds perpetuate inequities? Will revamping the process matter? As a senior woman colleague at a peer institution comments: "Probably ALL of these systems can allow the guys to reproduce themselves. In MIT's case it's the heads, in ours it can happen at several levels, take your choice. Here, there are multiple levels of checks and balances. Of course, this just gives more than one opportunity to shoot a female candidate down." Certainly, MIT is not a democracy, no university is. The actual role of department heads at School Council may (or may not) be advisory. Perhaps in matters concerning tenure and promotion, a department head proposes, and each dean disposes. To what purpose does MIT encourage the anomalous concentration of power in the hands of department heads?
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