First African-American, first woman Harvard College Dean steps down, highlighting Ivy League's lack of diversity

In the wake of a controversy surrounding secret searches of faculty emails, Harvard College Dean Evelynn Hammonds — the first African-American and the first woman to serve in that role — announced that she will resign on July 1 to return to teaching and research.

Some believe her transition out of a leadership position at one of the most prestigious spaces of higher learning in America is an indicator of the difficulties blacks face in attaining and retaining these roles.

“These elite institutions are the battleground,” Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, MSNBC analyst, author and professor of sociology at Georgetown University, told theGrio. “That’s what’s at stake. America is trying to remain America by keeping those as bastions of privilege and power that as much as possible exclude — not include — people of color and other minorities, including women. I mean, there have been strides, of course. But Malcolm X said you can’t put a knife in my back nine inches, pull it out six inches and call it progress.”

A respected academic leader steps down

Hammonds had served as dean of Harvard College for five years when her departure was announced on May 28.

In a news release posted on the Harvard Public Affairs and Communications website, Hammonds said she will head a new program on race and gender in science and medicine at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

“Being dean of Harvard College has been an immensely rewarding experience for me, but I miss engaging deeply with my scholarship and teaching,” said Hammonds.

The announcement made no mention of the months-old email search controversy, which resulted from attempts to find out who leaked information about a college cheating scandal to student newspaper The Harvard Crimson.

The history of the controversy

According to The Boston Globe, after more than 100 students reportedly cheated on a take-home exam last May and a confidential faculty memo regarding this matter made it to The Crimson, university administrators secretly probed the email accounts of 16 resident deans to find the leak, searching subject lines only. Those searches were authorized by Hammonds and Michael Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Hammonds later admitted that she ordered another round of searches without notifying Smith, although she had initially told the press she had not conducted any additional searches. The revelation prompted The Crimson to call for Hammonds’ resignation.

“Since Hammonds provided misinformation regarding the highly sensitive issue of email searches,” the April Crimson editorial stated, “and since she violated clear policy regarding those searches, her presence at the helm of the College stands as a roadblock to rebuilding trust between students, faculty, and the administration. For the good of the University, Hammonds must resign.”

Hammonds’ high praise from Harvard brass

In the resignation announcement, Harvard President Drew Faust and Smith offered only high praise for the outgoing dean.

Faust said Hammonds has “fully invested herself in improving the experience of our undergraduates both inside and outside the classroom, and in promoting a culture of inclusion and community across the College.”

Smith called her “an important partner in our efforts to reinvigorate the student experience at Harvard College” and “deeply committed to the well-being of students and passionate about supporting their opportunities to explore their academic and extracurricular interests.”

Hammonds told The New York Times that the controversy did not factor into her decision to resign.

“I was never asked to step down,” Hammonds said. “I have been in discussions to return to academia and my research for some time.”

“The e-mail controversy was difficult, but it was not a motivating factor in my decision to step down as dean,” she said. Hammonds will take a sabbatical for the first time in 11 years before taking on her new duties at Harvard.

Black academics on the expectation of perfection

While Hammonds seems at peace with her decision, some find her circumstances disconcerting because they speak to the lengths black academics at top schools might feel pressured to go to in order to appear competent.

“It was personally very sad to me to see her have to step down because of something like this, but I also think, without trying to put words into her mouth, I also think that the pressure on her as a dean of color put her in this position,” Dr. Anthea Butler, associate professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, told theGrio.

“The expectation is that you’re going to get to the bottom of this problem, and you don’t want to seem incompetent. You want to seem thorough,” said Butler. “You know that there are people there who are just thinking you have that position because you are a woman and a person of color, do you see? So I think because of what happened, she went to this extreme to get things done, because she did not want to be perceived as a person who would not take care of business. And that can make you get off-balance, too.”

Dyson believes Hammonds’ difficulties are a metaphor for what people of color face every day.

“Isn’t it ironic that the very thing that she’s come under criticism for is the very thing to which she is subject as a woman and a person of color — the kind of collective surveillance of the culture, except it doesn’t get called out that way,” he said. “That kind of scrutiny, that kind of examination, that can sometimes lead to overdoing it to make sure that you’re seen as competent in doing your job well.

“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

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