The Ivy League as a whole is not doing enough to promote gender and racial equality in teaching, but Penn is far ahead of its peers in hiring women and minority professors, according to a new report released by graduate students at Yale.
Collected from a federal database, the report found that of the 433 tenure-track professors hired by Ivy League institutions in 2003, 14 were black and eight were Latino. Of these 433, only 150 were women.
However the report, called "The (Un)Changing Face of the Ivy League," does not examine the number of job applicants to Ivy League positions, nor does it compare hiring percentages across schools nationwide.
The report, released by Yale's pro-union graduate student group, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, comes a little more than a month after Harvard President Lawrence Summers made comments about women in science that have since drawn much criticism.
"We all hoped that there would be some kind of improvement over [the last] 10 years," said Rose Murphy, a GESO senior research analyst who contributed to the report. "It was disappointing that there wasn't."
The report did have some bright spots for Penn, relative to its peers, in terms of diversifying its faculty.
Penn was the only Ivy League school to hire more female than male tenured faculty last year. In 2003, the University hired 11 tenured faculty -- six women and five men.
Between 1993 and 2003, tenured female faculty at Penn increased by 5 percentage points, from 14.5 to 19.5. Over that same period, the percent of black and Latino faculty at Penn increased by .8 and .7 percent to 3 and 2.1 percent, respectively.
In addition, the report highlighted a two-tiered Ivy League hiring system.
While hiring of tenure-track professors between 1993 and 2003 has increased by 10 percent across the Ivy League, the hiring of non-tenure-track professors has grown by 108 percent. Non-tenure-track professors often do not participate in research and generally are not paid as well.
The problem, the report claims, is that this track is disproportionately filled with women and minorities.
This is partially a result of universities participating in "tokenism," according to Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania co-Chairwoman Sayumi Takahashi. By this practice, schools hire a few minority faculty, but "then they will be relegated to these less prestigious, less well-paying jobs," Takahashi said.
"It's a real problem," she added.
At Penn, black non-tenure-track faculty increased at nearly the same rate as tenure-track black faculty. But the number of Latinos in the non-tenure-track faculty, increased from 11 to 31, while the number of tenured Latino professors increased only from nine to 10.
Both Takahashi and Murphy expressed hope that the issues in the report could be resolved.
"Faculty need more voice in terms of the hiring process. They need more input," Takahashi said.
To address these concerns, GET-UP representatives presented the report to University President Amy Gutmann yesterday and are hoping to meet with her soon to discuss the issue. Gutmann said she is reviewing the report.
