Time for a Female President at Harvard

It may well be a time for Harvard to choose its first female President .

Regarding his unfortunate remarks at the "NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce," Harvard University's President Lawrence Summers released a complete transcript. I applaud this move on Harvard's part. In the transcript, President Summers stated at the beginning of the talk,

I am speaking unofficially and not using this as an occasion to lay out the many things we're doing at Harvard to promote the crucial objective of diversity

In my view it is not that anyone is trying to keep Summers from speaking his mind. He has done so. My impression so far (I am currently in a reread of his remarks) is he is totally disconnected from women's lives and institutionalized sexism.

In the films "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," and in "The Joy Luck Club," we see that some progressives think it's enough to offer a few seats at the table, but they never really confront their own racism, except when the token guest might become part of the family.

The hackneyed phrase, "quotas don't work" is true, but more accurately it should be said, "quotas, in and of themselves without institutional changes, don't work."

The Women's Movement suggested "sexism is a form of racism." Racism is acting in favor, or against, someone solely because of a naturally occurring physical variation over which the individual has no control.

Shockley, a few years back, used statistics to prove blacks were not intellectually equal to whites. He completely missed the institutionalized racism that came out of Jim Crow and "separate, but equal."

Harvard is the old boys network all the way and the old boys like the fair haired boys and promote them for they see themselves in the younger man. Harvard is very old money and the classes that came before that endow the University are best approached by other senior men. Harvard, until World War Two, was a men's club and the University has yet to break out of that old money mode.

Women? The old boys don't relate and they don't mentor. The Business School even took to setting up informal dinners of executive MBA alumna women to mentor graduating MBA females. Why would males not be offered a similar dinner? Because all dinners are male dinners. The female MBA of the kindred Summer speaks to have taken to self-mentoring and co-mentoring. This is where the whole process of female career development and grooming has fallen apart.

Some 25 years ago, someone I know coined the phrase, "the glass ceiling." There is an invisible ceiling that keeps women from rising. Invisibly, women bump against it, yet no one seems to see it.

It is piercing this glass ceiling, that is important. Summers may be speaking freely, but his remarks show he has no grasp.

It may well be a time for Harvard to choose its first female President .

____

Also posted on mediagirl.org

http://www.mediagirl.org/node/230#comment

•  Harvard doesn't change

  When I was there in the mid-80's, one of my good friends was raped by a guy in her dorm (or "house", because Harvard can't do anything like everyone else does.)
  She took her complaint up the food chain and the net result was they ended up vilifying HER. She was forced to move off campus rather than confront this guy every day in the dining hall, since they took no action at all. Harvard's upper echelons are indifferent at best and criminally negligent at worst (remember the murder there a few years back? The girl who killed her roommate and then herself had tried to get help for herself at many different levels and was blown off). I would NEVER want my children to go there. Funny, because my Dad went there and he hated it too, but I wouldn't listen.

  by BlueGoo on Sat Feb 19, 2005 at 04:08:34 PM PDT

  •  Systemic Sexism

    I am very sorry to hear what happened to your good friend. This is not an isolated incident. I missed the story about the woman who killed herself and her roommate.

    The pressure at Harvard is incredible. Everyone entering there is at the top of his or her class and at the top of their game and Harvard grades on a curve. Saying that women who graduate from that pressure cooker are somehow not quite up to scratch does not make logical sense.

    This is why a female President of Harvard makes sense because that will sharpen the issues and smoke out the boys-will-be-boys attitudes than many men have.

    And yet, for all its failing, I look at the video that documents the 350th anniversary of the founding and sob my eyes out for what the school was and still could be. I hope the Fellows see fit to turn the corner before Harvard becomes a fossil.

    by Matsu on Sat Feb 19, 2005 at 04:39:02 PM PDT

    •  well...

      This is why a female President of Harvard makes sense because that will sharpen the issues and smoke out the boys-will-be-boys attitudes than many men have.

      Well, we'll see if that happens at penn or princeton. i doubt it.

      by delphis on Sat Feb 19, 2005 at 05:12:17 PM PDT

•  Agreed

  The man seems quite out of touch, and immune to appeals of reason. I've written about my own take on his remarks in some detail here.

  by media girl on Sat Feb 19, 2005 at 04:26:46 PM PDT

•  Harvard already has a President

  by skipper2379 on Sat Feb 19, 2005 at 05:01:51 PM PDT

  •  At the moment. So does the US.

    But we're working on that, aren't we? Or do you think that 'President' should be a lifetime appointment for both Harvard and the White House?

    by bellatrys on Sat Feb 19, 2005 at 05:11:15 PM PDT

    •  Not sure on this

      Isn't the President of Harvard a seven year term?

      by Matsu on Sat Feb 19, 2005 at 05:30:34 PM PDT

•  What I find particularly outrageous

  Is that Mill - an economist and political philosopher worth a thousand of any living today, even if I do disagree with him on some things - addressed everything that Summers blats about, from the problem that women aren't encouraged, as well as actively discouraged, from competition even, let alone specific fields, to the disfunctional familial and gender-stereotyped expectations of society as a whole - and says that until women have had as many centuries of truly equal opportunity, it's pointless to talk about "where are all the female [fill-in-the-blank]s?"

  On the Subjection of Women, 1869

  It's particularly telling that he ends by predicting a more radicalized feminism if things aren't addressed soon by society, and also by using racism as the empathic means of explaining sexism to Clueless Males who Just Don't Get It.

  Of course, that wouldn't work very well with Summers, would it...

  by bellatrys on Sat Feb 19, 2005 at 05:16:22 PM PDT

•  I'm not sure it's the solution

  I was in graduate school at an Ivy League school. The worst professors I dealt with in terms of being least supportive of my having any  kind of life outside graduate school were women. It's a wonderful idea that the sisterhood would enable women to succeed, but speaking as someone who was vilified by her female professors for daring to get pregnant while she was working on a PhD, it didn't happen for me.
  My guess is that any woman president hired now by Harvard would have to be a product of the brutal dog-eat-dog pedagogy that's practiced there and other elite schools. Not sure she would come in and be any more supportive. But do I think what the current Prez said was outrageous? Of course.

  by lorraine on Sat Feb 19, 2005 at 05:55:12 PM PDT

•  Good point

  Can the hypothetical female president change a culture of which she is a product and in which she excelled to the point of reaching the presidency? I don't know. Back in the day, the president of the "major" university I attended was a woman and she was, I thought --  to the extent any undergraduate can judge these things -- a very capable and positive president for the institution. But I think the various deans had a greater influence on the academic culture within the quad. They were all men. And while there are some very notable and noteworthy female scholars working and teaching there today, it's still an institution known for its conservative thought, with a shining tur example on the Supreme Court who is hardly known to be sympathetic or even cognizant of women's concerns or feminist issues.

  Across the country, a female president presided over a rather appalling scandal involving rape and sexual harrassment and prostitution in athletics.

  So maybe a president is not very powerful to effect real change.

  Still, when the head of the money -- which is really what the president is about, let's face it -- sets a tone, it's hard to separate that from the values the institution inculcates in its students and represents in society.
  

  by media girl on Sat Feb 19, 2005 at 09:08:12 PM PDT

  •  Is there a woman who is up to do the job?

    Lowell and Conant were powerful and some of their views - especially Lowell's - were reactionary, yet they shaped the school.

    I recall a documentary on West Point about the first women at West Point entitled "No Excuse, Sir.". Bringing women in was a whole new thing. The academy had righted itself in the past. The academy was going in the wrong direction and Douglas MacArthur was brought in to fix things after World War One, but MacArthur did not have the issue of sexism to deal with.

    Maybe no woman is capable of doing the job a Lowell, Conant, or MacArthur could do and, after all, for they become part of the men's enclave that can hunker down and wait her out.

    That no woman can do it is a possibility. Maybe the system can't be fixed by women since none have the leadership skills and opportunity.

    That may be the bottom line reality.

    by Matsu on Sat Feb 19, 2005 at 10:31:55 PM PDT