A Lever Long Enough by Robert McCaughey

Author:Robert McCaughey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

Ever since the engineering school has existed, the College has been dictating the policies of the University. Our School has always had to play second fiddle to College administration…. We urge the School’s administration to show more courage to face such crises. Our School has been pushed around enough and it is now time for us to fight.41

It took three years before Low Library’s budget officers provided the president with the numbers for a university-wide school-by-school financial analysis. Those for the engineering school were not good. They showed its “expenses over revenues” had been running for the past several years at around $3 million per year, with the costs per full-time student rising steadily. It was clear to anyone who saw these numbers that only by bringing about a rapid increase in enrollments and making sharp cuts in faculty could the situation be reversed. Dean Hennessy gave assurances to Provost de Bary that he was committed to both, but by then neither the provost nor the president believed him equal to the task.42

Finally, two more challenges facing Columbia at large in the early 1970s further complicated the lives of engineers and their embattled dean. The first came in November 1971 in the form of a letter from the Civil Rights division of the Department of Labor citing the university for failing to provide information attesting to its compliance with Title IX regulations concerning the employment of women. This followed on a complaint lodged by Columbia women employees citing statistical evidence they had compiled from catalogs and other university publications that made a prima facie case for longstanding gender discrimination. The university was now on notice that it would not only have to come up with numbers it had never felt the need to compile, but to undertake corrective action to address the underrepresentation of women in its employ that those numbers would, to a certainty, reveal.43

Underrepresentation of women among the university’s faculties was beyond dispute. Of the university’s thirteen professional schools, only the School of Nursing had enough women faculty to escape censure. The law and business schools had no women on their faculties in 1971. The engineering school had a faculty of ninety-five members, all male. Faced with the prospect that without remedial action the university risked the withdrawal of all federal funding, and taken aback by reports of egregious and longstanding instances of salary discrimination against women that came to light, President McGill assured the Department of Labor and women’s groups on campus that corrective policies would be promptly put in place.44

This meant hiring more women faculty by Columbia’s schools, even as most, including the engineering school, were under pressure to reduce faculty size. True, unlike several schools and departments in the humanities with wildly disparate gender ratios of students and faculty, the engineering school enrolled so few women that it was less open to the charge made of departments in the humanities, specifically English and art history, that they gladly accepted women as tuition-paying students, certified their degrees, and then refused to hire them as faculty.

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