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December 8, 2006 > News > The Face of the Faculty

The Face of the Faculty

By Eric Doctor | Thresher Editorial Staff

In 1981, Joan Strassmann’s first year as a biology professor at Rice, she felt disenfranchised as the only woman in her department.

“I thought decisions got made at faculty meetings, and I would get to the faculty meetings and find out that the guys had all made the decisions already over coffee somewhere.” Strassmann said.

She received no maternity leave when any of her children were born. She tried to schedule them around her breaks.

Strassmann said since then, Rice has improved its climate for women faculty tremendously; it’s one of the few places that has female deans of both science and engineering.

In 2005, 24 percent of tenured or tenure-track professors were women. However, the numbers are not so encouraging for racial minorities; out of 503 tenured or tenure-track faculty members, 47 were Asian, 9 were Black, 9 were Hispanic and 1 was Native American, for a total of 13 percent of the faculty body.

Dean of Natural Sciences Kathy Matthews said her department is taking strong initiatives in recruiting women faculty with a program called ADVANCE. ADVANCE provides grants to universities to allow them to bring women — particularly women of color — into faculty and leadership positions.

Matthews said the program’s goal is to increase the percentage of female faculty in each science and engineering field to the same percentage as that of women who receive doctoral degrees, also known as pool levels. In some areas, particularly the biosciences, Rice’s percentages come close to or even exceed pool levels, but Matthews said it is difficult in other areas to match pool levels.

“There is a biological reality, and that is that the childbearing years correspond pretty strongly to the years of graduate school, post-doctoral [fellowships], and the years that you have to put in to be tenured as a faculty member,” Matthews said. “Some women are not willing to give up those childbearing years or to do what is necessary during those childbearing years to pursue a faculty position.”

As of 2005, the natural science and engineering departments in which Rice was closest to or above pool levels were biology (47 percent pool versus 32 percent Rice), bioengineering (30-30) and mechanical engineering and material sciences (12-17). Rice was farthest off in chemical engineering (25-0), civil/environmental engineering (23-0), statistics (52-13), chemistry (31-9) and physics and astronomy (13-8). However, in the past year new hires have been made in these departments, greatly increasing the percentages, Matthews said.

Strassmann said that a diverse faculty is critical to an undergraduate student’s education.

“People vary in how they teach and what they put emphasis on, and some of that variation comes from different life experiences, which men and women have in this culture, and so do minorities,” Strassmann said. “and if you have all one flavor of faculty, you’re just not going to get that.”

Student Center Director Boyd Beckwith, who was instrumental in promoting gay-friendly hiring policies at Rice, agrees.

“I think [that a diverse faculty is important] in the same way that a diversified student body is important to any student’s education,” Beckwith said. “I think oftentimes students learn as much from each other because they’re from different backgrounds as they do in the classroom.”

Guiding presence

Besides providing varied perspectives, a diverse faculty is essential to providing positive role models for a diverse group of students, Matthews said. People tend to look for themselves in their mentors — if people do not see positive role models with similar backgrounds as themselves in research positions, they are less likely to pursue a research track, she said.

Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Carol Quillen, whose position was created last year partly to examine how Rice can achieve a more diverse faculty, said the problem goes beyond university hiring practices and even beyond the lack of positive role models in a research setting. Quillen said that the university needs to work at the high school level to actively recruit the best students of color and advance them in their academic pursuits.

“Because the pool is small now, particularly in science and engineering , we need to increase the pool, and the only way to do that is to increase the number of minority and women candidates that go to graduate school,” Quillen said.

Strassman has promoted the advancement of candidates through graduate school by working with them in labs.

“I like working with undergraduates, and I’ve had lots of undergrads through the lab,” Strassmann said. “I try to figure out what it is that’s important to them and what their own goals are, and then help them achieve those goals.”

An example of which Strassmann is particularly proud is Vanessa Ezenwa (Wiess ‘97), who is now a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Montana. Strassmann said she met Ezenwa during Ezenwa’s Orientation Week.

“She came in and she said, ‘does anyone ever hire freshmen?’ And I’m thinking, ‘An African-American woman wants to get in a research lab and is having a hard time?’ Anyway, I hired her on the spot.”

Strassmann said by the time Ezenwa graduated, she had two first-author publications in well-respected journals. She then went on to Princeton for graduate school.

Strassmann said Ezenwa was an exceptional case, but that there are many potential successes just like her.

“I’d say that minority students aren’t really different from any others,” Strassmann said. “I think what’s important is to welcome them into the lab, to try to have enough minority students in the group that they feel comfortable. Sometimes that makes a difference, sometimes it doesn’t. I’d like to see every student doing research.”

Moving beyond research, a sense of diversity should exist within course offerings available to students, Strassman said.

She said, “I think it’s really important for there to be some appreciation for things like women’s studies, Hispanic studies and African-American studies,”

Building a faculty

Though Rice is making a strong effort to promote the advancement of students from underrepresented groups through graduate school, there still exists the problem of attracting those students after they graduate.

“There’s no question that we have a lot of work to do,” Quillen said. “I think that it’s not self-evident how to go about doing that.”

Strassmann said she would like to see Rice implement a policy ofmore opportunity hiring, in which hires are made outside of the job search cycle.

The College of Arts and Sciences at Vanderbilt University, which has been particularly successful in recruiting prominent black faculty members, uses this policy, Edward Saff, executive dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Vanderbilt, said.

Last year alone the College of Arts and Sciences hired five prominent black faculty members, three of whom came from Duke University, Cornell University and University of Michigan

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