Alex Jung

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olumbia uses the word diversity so often that it can sound like white noise in the background. But throw in $15 million and people start to pay attention and ask questions. Columbia created the Diversity Initiative in the Provost's Office, appointed Jean Howard as vice provost, and earmarked $15 million to diversify the Arts and Science faculty. The creation of the Initiative was the result of a series of faculty-led initiatives. First, the Commission on the Status of Women, of which Howard was the chair, released the “Pipeline Report” in November 2001. The report found “leaks” in the academic pipeline from Ph.D. programs to tenured faculty positions. That is, females in academia, beginning as Ph.D. candidates, somehow left the road to tenure at a higher rate than their male peers. The Commission then formed an alliance with minority faculty members because, as Howard notes, it was “cryingly obvious” that there were not enough minority or female faculty members. They presented their concerns to University President Bollinger and Provost Brinkley, and in the fall of 2004, the Diversity Initiative was born. The question is what, exactly, it will do.

A Slow Response
Throughout its history, Columbia's leadership has put forth varying degrees of effort toward diversifying its campus and integrating women and minorities into its community. Mirroring the history of our country, Columbia's first efforts focused simply on the incorporation of women into its academic community. The struggle in the late 1800s to open Barnard as a separate women's college across the street reflects a compartmentalized concept of diversity. Even after the landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education in 1955, Columbia's leadership did not seem to understand that applying “separate but equal” to gender was a deeply flawed approach. It was not until 1983 that Columbia welcomed its first coeducational class.

If Columbia was slow to offer diplomas to women, it has proven still more reluctant to offer them tenured positions. Though Ruth Benedict, a professor of anthropology and an academic superstar, became Columbia's first tenured female professor in 1937, the composition of the tenured faculty today still does not reflect the gender balance of the student community. Progress toward this goal has been painfully slow since Benedict's tenure: In 1990, 13 percent of the tenured faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences was female, and by 2004 that number had climbed only to 22 percent.

The ethnic makeup of Columbia's tenured faculty has been equally slow to diversify. Though most American universities instituted affirmative action following the landmark 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, only 8.1 percent of Columbia's tenured faculty was non-white in 1990. Over the past 14 years, that number has risen only to 14.1 percent.

Part of this sluggishness can be attributed to the tenure process itself, in which faculty members must spend years proving themselves before being offered tenure. However, the lack of a coordinated effort from the central administration to diversify the faculty is the more pressing problem. Simply allowing women and minorities into the undergraduate system has not created a fully integrated university. While the creation of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender in 1987 and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race in 1999 were important steps, these offices are not substitutes for diversifying the faculty in other departments, just as Barnard could never be a substitute for the admission of women into Columbia College itself. Creating separate compartments for women and minorities is not the same as integrating talented individuals department by department, so that every area of the University benefits from their presence.

Skeptics might wonder why a more diverse faculty is worth the effort. Jean Howard, the vice provost of the Diversity Initiative, offers a simple answer: talent. “If you want the most talented individuals [teaching], you have to access all areas. Right now,” says Howard, “we're not doing that.” If Columbia's recruiting process results in a disproportionate representation of white males, then Columbia is missing out on talented women and minority candidates. Part of the unpleasant truth, however, is that thanks to historical inequalities in American education, there simply are not as many women and minorities to draw from in certain fields. This should not be an excuse for complacency. If women and minorities are not represented in “hard” sciences like physics and mathematics, for example, then the University needs to reach out to them by actively cultivating a more democratic academic culture. When they see professors of their own gender or race in a field, students will be more likely to recognize that they can succeed in that field, too.

The Diversity Initiative
The goal of the Diversity Initiative is to diversify the tenured faculty and open up the process of tenure. To achieve this, the Initiative organized faculty-led meetings to look at indices of diversity within their departments over the past 15 years, and then compared the results to other universities. “We talk about all the factors that make it hard to get the people you target, and then we talk about the strategies that you can use that are new to make recruitment more likely, and about identification of candidates,” explains Howard. In addition to expanding the recruitment processes, her office is also conscious of retention and attrition rates. Tightly connected to recruitment and retention is, according to Howard, “getting your own pipeline working, and developing the graduate students who are going to become the future professorate.” There is an increasing emphasis on encouraging the recruitment and retention of women and minorities at the doctoral level in order to increase the national pool, as well as on recruiting a diverse junior faculty which can then become part of the tenured faculty in the future.

The issue dominating the conversation about the Diversity Initiative is the $15 million. The reason that the money is reserved for the School of Arts and Sciences, according to Howard, is that Arts and Sciences is the “symbolic heart” of the University. The hope is that initiating this project within Arts and Sciences will cause it to spread to other parts of the University. After the creation of the Diversity Initiative, for example, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) Diversity Initiatives Committee was formed in July 2005, with a commitment to work with the vice provost's office in addressing diversity concerns in SEAS. It, too, aims to analyze the recruitment process and access untapped reserves of talented women and minorities.

SEAS has a greater gender disparity than Arts and Sciences, and while SEAS technically includes a greater percentage of minorities, it has little diversity within those minorities. One could therefore be easily confused as to why the $15 million earmarked for increasing diversity is not going to the part of the school that needs it most. Certainly, $15 million directed toward further diversifying the largest part of the University generates more attention, which perhaps is not so much a cynical PR move as a public acknowledgement of the importance of a diverse faculty to any school. But limited resources require diversifying certain areas at the expense of others. This may be preferable to ignoring the problem entirely, but it also undercuts the effort to create a truly diverse campus.

What Is Diversity, Anyway?
Another problem the Initiative faces is that “diversity” is such a nebulous concept. While one might like to see a diverse and integrated faculty arise organically, the hierarchical nature of the University necessarily ties sweeping efforts at reform to the central administration. The administration deals with problems in the only way a bureaucracy knows how: by producing a flurry of committees and reports.

Institutionalizing the notion of diversity presents difficult questions because it requires the use of statistics that reinforce stereotypes by forcing the problem into categories. Even before beginning, we have to see how the institution chooses to define diversity. It is clear from how the conversation is currently framed that “diversity” means more women and minorities. However, if we were to go further, we could include a framework of gender identities, sexual orientations, and varying disabilities within the diversity discussion.

To see how Columbia defines diversity, it is instructive to look at its Diversity Mission Statement. The statement says that the University's goal is to create a faculty of “exceptionally talented women and men from different racial, cultural, economic and ethnic backgrounds regardless of their sexual orientation or disability status.” It gets more specific: “Columbia strives to recruit members of groups traditionally underrepresented in American higher education and to increase the number of minority and women candidates in its graduate and professional programs.” It is obvious from this statement that when Columbia says “diversity,” it means females and ethnic minorities, with other groups as an afterthought. This makes sense, given the historical mobilization of these groups for fair representation, but it is fair to ask why people of different sexual orientation, disability status, or socioeconomic status aren't defined as traditionally underrepresented groups.

Some might argue that we run the risk of diversity ad infinitum, subdividing and subdividing to make sure we have an acceptable percentage of transgendered nuns on welfare and bisexual single-parent bikers. It may be best to focus on the most troubling areas. “Diversity can be everything and nothing,” observes Dr. Farah Griffin, Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies and a faculty member on the Advisory Committee to the Diversity Initiative, noting that varieties of “race, ethnicity, and gender are the most glaring absences at Columbia.” But even while the national conversation on diversity has focused on women and minorities, it would be an oversight to leave out other means of conceptualizing diversity. Gender and race are identities that have deep resonance among individuals, but care must be taken to recognize the limitations of such categorization.

Howard herself seems keenly aware of this problem, and notes that diversity is a dynamic concept. The statistics through which it is observed, however, are not. Howard acknowledges different sexual orientations, disability statuses, and socioeconomic backgrounds as “positive goods” for the University, but raises the practical issue of data-tracking with regard to these identities, when people are hesitant to self-identify in categories that the University would use to identify them. After all, individuals seldom include “homosexual” as part of their resumes. When departments choose individuals to hire for positions, they should ideally be evaluated as individuals in whom different identities converge and create unique personal experiences. A major concern with categorization is that it can reinforce otherness and tokenization without contributing to an integrated community.

Diversity at Every Level
Howard stresses the importance of faculty members acting as initiators to complement the top-down measures taken by the University. She notes that the Office was created as a result of faculty initiative, and that the workshops on recruiting and retaining women and minorities are all faculty-led. “The idea is that you set up systems where leaders emerge all over the place, and start to do the work,” says Howard. “It's the only way it's going to have any impact.” Ideally, different departments would themselves actively recruit “diverse” candidates so that each department represents a diverse group of people. Special attention must be paid to diversifying particular departments because different departments can differ drastically in their faculty composition. If one looks closely at the natural sciences in terms of gender diversity alone, six of the 23 tenured faculty in the biological sciences department are female. Comparatively, of the physics department's 37 tenured professors, a paltry four are female. Even if biological sciences were to gain more female faculty and raise the gender diversity for natural sciences overall, this would do nothing to improve the physics department, which is arguably more in need of female faculty members. It would be wise, then, to approach diversity with greater focus on individual departments, so that departments can avoid the accusations of catering only to certain groups.

The danger of failing to integrate at every level of the University, including the University-wide, subject-wide, and department-wide levels, is again one of compartmentalizing and thus marginalizing certain groups. The natural sciences are overwhelmingly male; only 12.1 percent of the tenured faculty are female. Are the female undergraduates who major in the natural sciences and comprise 52.1 percent of all natural sciences majors led to believe that advanced work in their field is just a “male thing”? On the flip side, this logic also applies to departments such as Barnard's women and gender studies department (Columbia does not have its own), in which all of the tenured faculty members in the department are female. Does this mean women and gender are only significant to females? Anyone wandering down frat row would probably answer in the negative. Just as the stereotype that natural science is a “white male” field is constricting, so, too, is the idea that gender studies should be a solely female department.

It is important to recognize that gender studies and African-American studies departments were carved out in our University so that these marginalized groups could have a space in academia. Although there is still a need for this space, making it the sole reason for these departments' existence has unfortunately perpetuated the idea that women and gender studies is just for women. It is dangerous to say that a particular identity belongs in any particular department or field. Such an assumption devalues groups who do not obviously identify with the department, and it compartmentalizes those who do.

The Cost of Diversity
Another important question is where exactly the $15 million is going. As it turns out, $15 million can go pretty quickly. About $13 million is reserved for hiring new faculty, and 10 offers were recently made to prospective candidates. Departments submitted candidates who they believed were talented and “diverse” individuals. The money breaks down like this: if the salary of a faculty member is $80,000 (though it is often more), then another 30 percent must be added for overage costs (health insurance, etc.), as well as around $10,000 for research. This figure is then multiplied by five, because the $13 million is to support the new faculty for at least five years. In total, the money is projected to hire about 15 new faculty members. $15 million sounds like a lot more than it actually is.

Despite her trust in department-level reform, Howard recognizes that, to be blunt, money talks. If more significant hires are to be made in the future to keep diversity as a core value in recruitment, then the University needs to allocate more funds to this Initiative. As Professor of Economics Graciela Chichilnisky wrote in Spectator (October 2005) regarding the Diversity Initiative, “We need about $200 million to provide cash flow of $10 million annually.”

Does Diversity Have a Future?
Developing a smooth pipeline is the most important part of integrating women and minorities into academia at an earlier stage. By the first year of a Ph.D. program, the gender ratio is already skewed toward males due to higher female attrition. In 2000, the attrition rate for females in all divisions of the School of Arts and Sciences was 16 percent, compared to 5 percent for males. Not enough research has been done regarding why this phenomenon occurs, but the lack of female senior faculty could be part of the problem. “It helps to see someone in your career who is like you,” says Dr. Griffin. “For example, having female faculty in science [is important], because navigating a career as a woman in science is fundamentally different.” This results in a seeming catch-22, in which women drop out of Ph.D. programs because there are not enough female faculty members to act as role-models and mentors, which in turn reduces the number of female candidates for professor positions.

The most direct pipeline comes from tenure-eligible or junior faculty. Compared to the total national pool of junior faculty, Columbia's is attracting fewer than its share of female applicants. This is especially true in the natural sciences: In 1999-2000, the national pool of tenure applicants was 39 percent female, while Columbia's was only 14 percent female.

Studying these issues at Columbia would require a broader mandate for people who already have too much to do. The Office of the Vice Provost on Diversity Initiatives consists of only two individuals: Howard and her executive assistant, Andrea Thomas. In the fall of 2007, the office will come under review. According to Howard, the University recognizes that the Initiative is not a short-term effort. “I think enough things have happened in the last year and a half that people see that this could have a transformative effect over time; it [can't] transform an institution in a couple of years, but in 10 it might,” Howard says. However, the Office must not only be continued, but also expanded. The Initiative cannot succeed without vastly greater resources than it now has.

The Diversity Initiative is mainly working on hiring new candidates into tenured or tenure-track positions, but another important issue is making sure that they stick around. More work that focuses on faculty retention needs to be done, such as expanding child care facilities and creating a job bank that partners of faculty members can use. More broadly, the Initiative needs to further study attrition rates and recruitment strategies for women and minorities at every level of the University. Perhaps most important, however, is the need for a sustainable, fully staffed office to lead this initiative.

As he often does, in a University Chaplain Common Meal in February 2006, University President Bollinger painted the image of Columbia as a “global leader” for the future, as a university that recognizes its pivotal role in the international community. If Columbia truly wants to live up to this vision, it must first begin to work toward diversifying itself.