When University President Lawrence H. Summers locked horns with members of the Afro-American studies department earlier this year, Harvard’s commitment to diversity was called into question by members of the University community and the national press.

Though Summers issued several statements over the course of the controversy affirming his support both for the department and for the affirmative action policies that have been in place at Harvard since the 1970s, many students, professors and alumni have been left wondering just how substantial that support is.

Though Harvard excels in many areas, it has never been known for the diversity of its Faculty.

“The culture in the academy and at Harvard in the extreme is a white male culture,” says Cathy A. Trower, a senior researcher for the Project on Faculty Appointments at the Graduate School of Education (GSE).

But in recent years, a great deal of attention has been focused on turning around this centuries-old trend, particularly with respect to the promotion of gender equality at Harvard.

Today, women make up a mere 17.2 percent of professors in FAS, according to the University’s 2002 Affirmative Action Planbook, the annual statistical report on the diversity of the University. But that 17.2 percent is significantly higher than the 10.8 percent they constitued in 1993. And this year 13 of the 28 new senior appointments in the Faculty were women.

And Harvard’s problems with the recruitment and retention of female professors are not much more dire than those of its peer institutions.

Nationwide, only a quarter of the full-time faculty at research universities are female professors, according to an article published in Harvard Magazine by Trower and Richard P. Chait, professor of higher education at GSE.

And at Yale, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, female professors also constitute less than 20 percent of total faculty.

The numbers don’t lie—Harvard and its peers have not traditionally tenured a large number of female professors. Scholars who have studied the subject say that subtle institutional obstacles have been keeping women out of the academy. And, despite recent successes here and at other Ivies, Harvard still has many barriers to overcome.

Leading the Gender Revolution

Harvard recognizes its lack of women professors as a problem—and so far, it has dealt with the issue through standard bureaucratic means: identify problem, appoint committee, study problem, issue report, solve problem.

During his 11-year term, outgoing Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Jeremy R. Knowles has created several administrative bodies to facilitate the recruitment and retention of female and minority professors.

These bodies include the Office for Faculty Development, which, led by Associate Dean for Faculty Development Laura Gordon Fisher, works with departments to identify qualified female and minority candidates for tenure; the Task Force on Faculty Diversity, which was designed to focus on addressing the lack of female faculty in the natural and engineering sciences; and a twin task force created this year to address the same problems in the humanities and social sciences.

The Faculty’s approach to recruiting more females is more organic than that of some of its peer institutions. For example, while the Office of Faculty Development and the task forces work with departments to recruit women professors, Princeton created a committee earlier this year that, though composed of faculty members, works independently to recommend candidates who would “further diversify the faculty in all fields in which minorities or women are underrepresented.”