First African-American, first woman Harvard College Dean steps down, highlighting Ivy League's lack of diversity
ANALYSIS - Did Evelynn Hammonds, the first African-American and first woman to serve as Harvard College Dean, fall due to a pressure to be perfect?...
“You know, white folk can fail all day long,” Dyson also said. “That’s what it means to have white privilege. White privilege is not just being able to have money. White privilege means when you go into a high-end boutique, nobody’s going to follow you around assuming you ain’t got the money. And it also means that when you reach for your wallet, the policeman won’t assume it’s a gun and won’t shoot you. And it also means that people presume you’re intelligent and you’re skilled and you’re capable.
“But for black people and women who are double minorities, so to speak, we don’t have that presumption of innocence, that presumption that we are doing the right thing and are capable and gifted and articulate,” Dyson explained.
Part of the pressure on black administrators at Ivy League schools and similarly lofty institutions may stem from the fact that there are so few of them.
The Ivy League’s lack of leadership diversity
At the University of Pennsylvania, for example, just two out of 31 senior administrators — or 6.5 percent — are minorities. That prompted six senior faculty in the Africana Studies department to pen a column this January titled “Guess who’s (not) coming to dinner,” criticizing President Amy Gutmann’s failure to increase diversity in the school administration.
The problem is hardly limited to the University of Pennsylvania. A 2005 Yale University report, “The (Un)Changing Face of the Ivy League,” concluded that “as the Ivy League schools have increased the number of faculty over the past ten years, the proportion of black and Hispanic faculty has remained low and women and people of color are less likely to get hired into the higher-ranking, more secure academic positions.”
Since then, not much has changed. A recent report by the University of Pennsylvania’s Daily Pennsylvanian analyzed the minority senior administration presence at Ivy League institutions. Compared to its level of minority administrators, some schools fared worse. The rates are 3.8 percent at Yale and 5.6 percent at Brown, compared to 12 percent at Dartmouth, 12.8 percent at Columbia, 19 percent at Princeton and 20.6 percent at Cornell.
Of the 14.3 percent of the administrators at Harvard who are minorities — 28 in total — The Daily Pennsylvanian listed just one as African-American, and it was presumably Hammonds.
Leading African-American academics weigh in
Butler said that while diversity in academia is slowly headed in the right direction, more work needs to be done — in part because blacks who “make it” to the elite level aren’t immune to racism and sexism. On the contrary, they are subject to an even greater need to prove that they deserve a place among the elite.
Butler recounted stories of people assuming she works at Penn State (a less prestigious institution than the University of Pennsylvania), and a female student who told Butler she was “too emotive” during class, using coded language for the “loud black woman” stereotype.
“It just becomes a different, tighter, tougher game,” Butler said. “And that’s why we need some of us here to help people along and make sure that the pipeline stays open.
“We need to have more faces in the academy, and if the next generation of education is shaped by old white men in tweed jackets who are still around because they can’t afford to retire, then that doesn’t help any of us,” she continued. “I mean, I have nothing against those old white men in tweed jackets. As a matter of fact, they’re the ones who get to really focus on their work without anybody trying to make them into a symbol for something.”
Dyson noted that staying in the upper ranks can be as difficult as making it there, if not more, because highly successful blacks like Hammonds are typically given few, if any, chances to fail.
In the long run, this phenomenon may continue to stunt the growth of diversity in the higher ranks of the Ivy League and similar schools.
“Dean Hammonds is a first-rate scholar,” Dyson said, adding that “her return to the faculty there will be gratifying, but it’s unfortunate that black people and people of color and women are subject to double and sometimes triple standards and that we don’t get a chance to fail up. We often have to drop out. And others fail up. They mess up and then they get a better job, you know, or they learn on the job and their mistakes are not seen as fatal, or [as a] determinant of their destiny, or fateful. But ours, we get one chance and we’re gone.”
Follow Lauren Carter on Twitter at @ByLaurenCarter.
