Letters

Editor:
I read the Report from the Task Force on Women at UB with great interest. I firmly believe that a concerted, aggressive and clear extra effort (defined as affirmative action in lower case) to reach more balance in our faculty gender and racial diversity is a valuable goal.

I think it will lessen the cultural differences in the academy, it will increase our ability to deal with mentoring and providing role models for our increasingly diverse student base, it will open us to new models of teaching and communication, and enrich our scholarship, teaching and service, possibly developing a new thinking toward balancing these more equitably in the sciences and engineering in a research university.

Speaking strictly about the data for science faculty, the report clearly illustrates that despite written commitments, we have failed over the past 20 years where many of our peer institutions have succeeded in increasing the numbers of tenured and tenure track women in science and engineering.

As a member of the NSM faculty I have long been interested in the apparent lack of understanding of the historical roots of the lack of gender and racial balance and diversity among the faculty in physical sciences at UB.

I am distressed that few concerted efforts to deal with this imbalance are made in any planning during faculty searches in Chemistry, in particular. (I limit my comments to my home department, because I am aware of search procedures and actual searches in my department, but I guess I make the [perhaps poor] assumption that the same types of procedures are common in physical sciences departments in NSM.)

Some of my distress grows out of my experiences in national policy discussions while at NSF and on review and policy panels at NSF. I watch how other institutions deal with this issue.

I do not believe my colleagues seek to exclude women and minorities during faculty recruiting. I do believe that they are not cognizant of a number of issues related to faculty and staff recruiting in a strategic manner. I believe this grows out of the view that affirmative action is someone else's administrative concern. And, our affirmative action efforts tend to be "after the fact."

Affirmative action to me means making extra efforts to expand the pool of qualified candidates ABOVE that of the statistical distribution. No such efforts are made in this department. Advertisements are placed, including in minority and affirmative action sources, strong and clear statements of preference are made in the advertisements, my colleagues on the search committee are diligent, in my view, to identify qualified minority and women candidates during the screening of applications.

So why do we fail to address the serious imbalance in numbers reported in the Task Force's tables? In my view it lies in our sloppy search procedures. We also are stuck with simplistic nostrums about identifying and finding candidates. We have no training in extra efforts to identify candidates. We don't pay attention to what others do. We lack the knowledge or procedures to address the imbalance in the first step-identifying candidates.

An example can be gained from observing MIT's Chemical Engineering Department over the past few years. Despite the conventional wisdom that you never hire your own students/postdoc's, MIT's Chemical Engineering has hired two women by identifying their own best people and mentoring and recruiting them. One associate professor was a postdoc of a senior faculty member at MIT; she was recruited to stay at MIT as a faculty member. A current assistant professor was a graduate student at MIT who was convinced to postdoc down the road at Harvard and then return to MIT. This long-range planning and unusual recruitment are what is needed.

Since we do not reach out beyond advertisements and blanket letters, we cannot know who does not apply, and we cannot cull the best women and minority candidates because our pool of applicants is not large enough. We do not use personal contacts with successful women and minority full professors to identify by phone and mail, qualified women and minority applicants who might be postdoc'ing for mentors with similar interests and backgrounds.

I have sat on NSF review panels charged with identifying the best young postdoctoral scholars over the past few years. Each year, I have offered my colleagues who are running searches the list of the applicants and nominees, as a means to write these people to invite them to apply. Personal contacts like this overcome the reputation that precedes us, that by virtue of our statistics, we are not a friendly place for women and minorities.

The statistics published in the report by the Task Force on Women at UB for FNSM departments show that there are few women in certain departments and that there are deficits when compared with the expected values from the current population in that discipline. Despite 20 years of concern, we cannot even keep up with the distribution of women which are still underrepresented!

In my 15 years in Chemistry at UB, we have gone from one associate to one full to two (one full and one assistant) back to one (one associate professor). Despite recruiting which has raised the distribution of women in the department's graduate program over that period, we do not have sufficient numbers for role models or mentorship for women graduate students.

It is sensible to ask what I recommend as a step toward solution. I hope we focus on improving the faculty recruiting process at the initial stage of obtaining applicants, by developing ideas and insisting on aggressive measures to increase the pool of qualified women and minority applicants BEFORE the interview process.

We need leadership from the top to make this happen. We need direction from the President and Provost, at least in developing standards for our search procedures to help increase the pool of qualified applicants. And we need commitment, equally, from the faculty who make the choices.

Sincerely,
Joseph A. Gardella Jr.
Professor of Chemistry