Adopted: December 14, 2001
MEETING OF
NOVEMBER 16, 2001
President
George Rupp, the chairman, called the Senate to order at 1:15 p.m. in Schapiro
Engineering Auditorium. Thirty-nine of 91 senators were present during the
meeting.
Minutes and agenda: The agenda was adopted as
proposed. The minutes of October 26, 2001, were adopted with one change, a
rewording of one of the item headings requested by Howard Jacobson, the
parliamentarian.
President’s report:
--A special memorial service on November 15 honored
a total of 107 victims of the September 11 attacks with Columbia connections.
But now there is more sad news: the death of Nicholas Kemnitzer, a junior in
the College, and the recent crash of American Airlines 587, in which two
Columbia people died: Joseph Lopez, a 1996 graduate from the School of Social
Work, and Frederico de la Asuncion, a facilities worker at Health Sciences who
had just retired, with a gift from co-workers of a plane ticket home to the
Dominican Republic. The president said a number of Dominicans work at Columbia
and live in nearby Washington Heights. The Senate observed a moment of silence
for these latest tragedies.
--The president had expected a dip
in early decision applications this year in the wake of September 11, but the
results are heartening on balance: the College has seen a 10 percent rise in
those applications, through they are off slightly in Engineering.
--The concern the president had expressed about
government budgets at previous meetings appears to be well founded. New York
City, under pressure even before September 11, now faces a possible $4 billion
deficit. Before September 11, New York State was enacting its annual ritual of
restoring some of the items the governor took out in the bare-bones budget he
had announced in the spring. Now the bare bones are all there is. The Higher
Education Opportunity Program faces a reduction in funding of 34 percent; Bundy
aid may decline by about $3 million, or 6 percent. About a half-million dollars
in State funding for Columbia’s dental clinic uptown, which provides more care
than any other clinic in the city, has not been restored. Columbia’s Audubon
projects are now slated to get no state aid. The news on the state budget is
not catastrophic, but not good. Columbia will have to adjust its own budget
accordingly.
Short-term
prospects for federal aid are actually somewhat better, the president said,
because Congress is now ready to spend more freely, since the huge commitments
it has made to the fight against terrorism in any case break the previous taboo
on spending the social security surplus and more. The National Science
Foundation budget will rise by 8 percent, and the National Institutes of Health
are also expecting a healthy increase. The increase in the maximum Pell grant
to $4000 that the president had predicted at the previous meeting is authorized
in the legislation, but the funds appropriated are inadequate for awards higher
than the current year’s maximum of $3750.
--A large, inflated rat that Local 1 of the
plumbers’ union recently installed just outside College Walk required some
explanation. The union was protesting Columbia’s contract with Absolute
Plumbing, one of a number of contractors that Columbia has hired as part of its
commitment to working with local and minority businesses. Absolute is a small,
non-union outfit, the president said, whose workers receive higher wages, on
average, than Local 1 members.
--In response to concerns recently expressed about
FBI investigations of students, the president explained the guidelines set by
the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) on the disclosure of such
information. Columbia can disclose 1) directory information, 2) information
about a student applying for a job or to grad school who has signed a release,
and 3) information sought in a subpoena from a grand jury, in which case
Columbia is allowed to notify the student of the subpoena.
The
bill Congress has just passed, the Patriot Act, allows investigators to seek a
subpoena not only from a grand jury, but also from a judge, and does not allow
institutions to notify students who are under investigation.
Since
September 11 Columbia has provided only directory information to investigators;
in one instance, it contacted a student the FBI wanted to interview, who had no
objection.
In
response to a question from Sen. Rohit Aggarwala (Stu., GSAS/Hum), Mr. Jacobson
said FERPA applies to all students, including foreigners. It is also true that
visas for foreign students require their American universities to provide
certain information about them to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Most of this information is routine, though it includes a confirmation that a
student is really at the university identified in his or her visa. The Patriot
Act, like FERPA, applies to all students.
The
president called for vigilance on this issue. He expressed concern about the
apparent preoccupation of government agencies with student visas, when most of
the September 11 terrorists had tourist visas. He added that investigators seem
to be focusing on international students from particular regions. The president
repeated that Columbia has disclosed nothing it wouldn’t have disclosed before
September 11.
Sen.
Stephanie Neuman (Research Staff) said security agencies frequently approach
Columbia officers who teach security issues for information about their
students. She asked if such requests require special vigilance
The
president said many University officials undergo apparently pointless
background checks conducted the by FBI. Typically an agency seeking information
on a student applicant presents the student’s signed consent to the release of
the information.
Mr.
Jacobson said the acting vice president for student services would be sending
out a memo on this subject. The president said a Columbia instructor has the option
of asking to see the signed consent, or of refusing to respond altogether.
Nominations to committees: The Senate approved a list
of late changes in committee assignments, which had been at the door.
Executive Committee
chairman’s report: Chairman Paul Duby (Ten., SEAS) said the Executive Committee, at its
November 9 meeting, had finished its annual appointments of people involved in
the administration of the Rules of Conduct Governing Political Rallies and
Demonstrations. A number of committee seats remain to be filled. He read the
names of the members of the newly elected tenured delegation from Health
Sciences, which was increased from 5 to 8 in the reapportionment plan adopted
by the Senate last April, and approved by the Trustees in October: William
Blaner, John Nicholson, and Debra Wolgemuth were reelected, and John Brust, Ira
Goldberg, Arthur Karlin, Henry Spotnitz, and Michael Shelanski were elected. In
the Arts and Sciences, Eugene Galanter, Herbert Gans, and Robert Pollack were
recently elected as tenured senators.
The
Executive Committee also had further discussion on the problem of Senate
sponsorship of a hearing on the unionization of Columbia students who teach. At
the previous Senate meeting, Mr. Jacobson had warned that formal involvement of
the Senate, which is widely understood to be an organ of management, might
expose the University to a charge of unfair labor practices. A few hours before
the present meeting, Sens. Duby and Aggarwala had met with Mr. Jacobson and
Patsy Catapano of the General Counsel’s Office. The upshot was an understanding
that it is appropriate for such a public discussion of unionization to be
organized by the Senate student caucus, which will keep the counsel’s office
informed of its plans. Sen. Duby said the Executive Committee supports the idea
of a public discussion of this issue, and understands that the administration
is willing to participate.
Sen.
Duby said the Executive Committee responded enthusiastically to the report from
the Commission on the Status of Women on the progress of women through
Columbia’s “academic pipeline.” Members had not had a chance to read the whole
40-page report yet, but supported the idea of a preliminary resolution of
praise, which was distributed at the start of the present meeting.
The
Executive Committee also discussed the Provost’s annual letters to the Senate,
which have grown to nearly 20 pages in length in the past decade. In the last
few years, Sen. Duby, these comprehensive reports have had little Senate
discussion, but have been useful for committees. This year the Provost will
scale down his report, with an oral presentation at the December meeting, and
perhaps a summary sheet.
New business:
--Report from Commission on the Status of Women:
“Advancement of Women Through the Academic Ranks of the Columbia University
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences: Where Are the Leaks in the Pipeline?”
The
President proposed to add the preliminary resolution of praise for the
Commission report to the present agenda item, a discussion of the report. There
was no objection.
Sen.
James Applegate (Ten., A&S/Nat. Sci.) presented the report for the
Commission. He said former chair Jean Howard, impressed by a pipeline study at
Michigan in 1996, initiated a similar study here in the fall of 1998. Lucy
Drotning, who works in the Provost’s Office of Institutional Research, gathered
most of the data. After Prof. Howard left Columbia’s English Department for
Penn at the end of last year, Kim Kastens, a Research Scientist at Lamont, took
charge of the project and wrote the report.
The
Commission followed the progress of graduate students and junior faculty
through the academic pipeline. Sen. Applegate said the group decided early on
to focus solely on the Arts and Sciences, partly because this part of the
University is disproportionately represented in the Commission’s membership,
and partly because at the rate the Commission was going, a broader study might
never have ended.
Referring
to a series of tables and graphs projected as slides, Sen. Applegate gave a
brief overview of the study. He said the Commission did not focus on the
question of promotion to tenure. That was done by a provostial committee on
salary equity, whose findings were reported to the Senate in 1998.
Sen.
Applegate showed that the proportions of women dwindle at each step up in the
academic hierarchy. The proportion of Columbia’s female Ph.D.’s can serve as
proxy for the national pool, he said. Columbia’s junior faculty in the Arts and
Sciences is significantly less female than the national population of Ph.D.’s.
The dropoffs are starkest in the Natural Sciences, where the proportion of
tenured females has stayed constant at around 10 percent over the past decade.
The population of graduate students in the sciences is also significantly less
female than the population of undergraduate science majors. But the large
number of pre-med students, many of them biology and psychology majors, may
explain part of this drop.
Sen.
Applegate showed that after one year and after seven years of graduate school,
female students dropped out at a consistently (though not drastically) higher
rate than male students.
Sen.
Applegate showed the relationship among the proportions of women in the
national pool of available Ph.D.’s, the applicant pool for tenure-track
positions at Columbia, and the population of junior faculty hired by Columbia.
He noted a striking drop--roughly by half--in female representation from the
availability to the applicant pools.
The
fraction of female hires, on the other hand, is somewhat larger than that of
female applicants. Sen. Applegate said the Commission had not expected to find
that women, once Columbia is aware of them, in fact do somewhat better than
men. Sen. Applegate said the problem is that Columbia is not seeing roughly
half of the potential female applicants, whom he called “stealth women.” He
said it is important to figure out why this is happening, and to do something
about it.
On
the question of entry to tenure, Sen. Applegate noted that, except in the
Humanities, the group of faculty appointed to tenure from outside the
university is much less female than the group of internally promoted tenured
faculty. Sen. Applegate said his own division, the Natural Sciences, has the
worst record, with only 16 percent of women among internally promoted tenured
faculty, 8 percent of faculty appointed from outside Columbia, and 0/11
“targets of opportunity,” or searches with an applicant pool of one faculty
“star.”
On
the question of “microclimates,” or differences in conditions for women in
different departments, Sen. Applegate said hiring and promotion data for all
A&S departments will soon be on the web. He said the Commission had devoted
some attention to the “lifestyle” of different departments, and differences in
receptiveness to women in the culture of research groups.
Sen.
Applegate referred to exhibits listing departments with good records in hiring
and promoting women during the 1990s, and others with poor records. He also
showed tables for two departments not named in the report, one with a good
record, the other with a bad one. He did not name the departments but said the
good one had won three Nobel Prizes in recent years, and the other one was of
special concern to Prof. Jean Howard.
Sen.
Eugene Litwak (Ten., A&S/Soc. Sci) asked if a woman who completes a
post-doctoral fellowship and then suspends her career to have children would
show up in the national availability pool. Sen. Applegate said the national
availability pool does not include this group, or Ph.D.’s who have done two
post-docs. He did not think these omissions seriously affect the data.
Sen.
Jonathan Cole, the Provost, praised the Commission’s study, which he called a
very thoughtful piece of work, with suggestive data. He expressed particular
satisfaction that Lucy Drotning, who works out of his office, made a helpful
contribution. He said he would immediately take up some of the report’s
recommendations.
He
added a few remarks to provide some context for the Commission’s study. He said
there is now a rich literature on women in the sciences and academic
professions that the committee ought to familiarize itself with, to be sure not
to try to reinvent solutions to problems that have already been studied
nationally, internationally, and comparatively. He said he had been studying
this subject for 30 years, and could provide a sense of trends in studies over
that span. On some issues, he said, speculation can be superseded by a wealth
of good published findings. The Provost called particular attention to a major
report that the National Academy of Sciences is about to publish on precisely
this subject.
He
said comparative data are also useful. He had just chaired a committee
conducting a four-day site visit at Penn, where the findings on women in the
academic pipeline are highly similar. He said Columbia has done somewhat better
than Penn on these measures, but shouldn’t take that much credit, because the
differences are not that large. Broad trends, at work throughout the academic
world, are affecting women’s progress.
The
Provost repeated his praise for the Commission’s work, which he said should
continue. He said he looked forward to working with the group on the next
phase.
Sen.
Phyllis Garland (Ten., Journalism) asked if the Commission’s study could be
extended to Columbia’s professional schools. Sen. Applegate said a similar
approach could be applied to all of Columbia’s faculties, but the Commission
would need new members to help guide such studies.
Sen.
Marni Hall (Stu., GSAS/Nat. Sci.) asked if Ph.D. students in the sciences based
at the uptown campus were included in the study. Sen. Applegate said he thought
not.
Sen.
Frances Pritchett (Ten., A&S/Hum.) wondered how the paucity of women in the
applicant pool might be reconciled with their higher success rate once they get
here.
Sen.
Stephanie Neuman asked if the study was funded. Sen. Applegate said Lucy
Drotning’s time was allotted by the Provost.
Sen.
Henry Pinkham, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, said he had
only recently learned of this study, but was eager to work with the Commission.
He said he had begun to study disturbingly high overall attrition rates in
GSAS, but he was also troubled about the even higher rates for female students.
He said the Commission’s recommendation of longitudinal studies is excellent,
but he would need additional help to conduct them.
The
president noted that Ms. Drotning works for the institution, and there is no
reason in principle why she couldn’t also help with a GSAS study.
Asked
by Sen. Litwak whether people who just haven’t finished their Ph.D.’s are
counted in the attrition figures, Sen. Applegate said the Commission, for a
given semester, included in the attrition figures all students who had not
graduated and who were not registered. Sen. Pinkham said some of these students
might come back, and should not be assumed to have dropped out. But he said the
Commission’s data look roughly right.
Sen. David Cohen, Vice President for Arts and
Sciences said there are noticeable differences among A&S departments in
their general awareness of the goal of expanding the representation of women.
The constant rotation of chairs also varies the degree of attention to this
problem. For example, the department cited by the Commission as exemplary for
expanding its female membership--Economics--never set this as a goal.
Sen. Cohen said there is also enormous competition
for top women, much more than for top men, and some departments will fight this
battle harder than others. He said his office tries to sustain a level of
sensitivity, and to provide availability data for most searches. He has also questioned
some searches in which women are underrepresented. He concluded that the
proportion of women promoted to tenure in the past decade--one third--partly
reflects a conscious effort by the Arts and Sciences.
The
president called attention to the Executive Committee resolution, which he
characterized as a kind of placeholder for a more substantial later response to
a sustained analytical study from the Commission. He also praised Sen.
Applegate’s oral presentation as highly illuminating.
The
Senate approved the resolution without dissent.
The president adjourned the meeting at around 2:30
p.m.
Respectfully submitted,