Small Step for the K-School

January 21, 1981



Not many schools here have fewer female professors than Ronald Reagan’s cabinet. But the Kennedy School, with zero, does, and for most of the last term, student and women’s groups have called on the school to recruit, actively, women and minority faculty and students, and to scrap classroom policies they considered discriminatory. One women’s group even charged that the school’s lackadaisical search for women and minority faculty candidates has violated federal affirmative action hiring codes, a complaint still pending with the Department of Labor.

Last week, the school finally began to act. Administrators announced they will include students on the school’s three admissions committees—as a student panel had requested. And they revealed they will soon hire a female associate professor, the highest-level female faculty member in the school’s history.

Admirable as these moves are, they can only be first steps. Even with the hiring of Mary Jo Bane, the school still will have no tenured women or minorities. And this year’s graduating class from its Master of Public Policy program boasts only two minorities among its 60 students. Those are startling statistics about an institution that aims to staff government posts that themselves increasingly deal with affirmative action questions.

The school must also take a hard look at the classroom techniques employed by many of its professors. As one student said of the case studies many K-School professors employ, “In all our cases, there are just white males in the government, but all the women are welfare recipients.”

To combat just that sort of subtle discrimination, a student group has recommended a mandatory day-long seminar for faculty on “institutional racism and sexism.” We urge the school to adopt this suggestion—and one that it hire a full-time recruiter for minority students.

Each time students have made requests, administrators have replied that they sympathize with the suggestions but that “financial considerations” make implementation impossible. Coming from the K-School, which is growing as fast as any graduate school here and which has raised millions of dollars to support construction of a new building, that excuse rings false. Without an overhaul of the school’s hiring and admissions policies, any new building would merely become an expensive facade for the Kennedy School’s all-too-evident discrimination.