Getting From Here to There: Diversity, Women, and the PhD Pipeline

Well, after a temporary absence from the land of the internets, AdHoc Magazine, Columbia’s premier (=only) progressive magazine, is back online! As a kickback to the past, here’s an article we did the year it all began.

Columbia University, like many contemporary universities, has a problem with “leaks” in the academic pipeline: i.e. a significantly greater number of female PhD candidates drop out of their graduate programs than their male counterparts. In response to this problem, Columbia launched a “Diversity Initiative” to try to determine the reasons why women and minority PhD candidates were dropping out of their programs at this higher rate and to attempt to rectify this problem. In this article, which won the 2006 Campus Independent Journalism Award for Women/Gender Coverage, Alex Jung explores the status and success of the Initiative, creating a public record of one university’s attempt to improve diversity. In doing so, Jung looked at the role of mentors, the effect of seeing professors of the same gender or color as you, questions of other diversities such as sexuality, and the vast bureaucratization of the university.

While the story was written in March 2006, I doubt that situation is very different today (given the sluglike movements of the academic steamship), though if anyone knows any differently, I’d love to hear about it.

From the first paragraph:

Columbia uses the word diversity so often that it can sound like white noise in the background. But throw in $15 million and people start to pay attention and ask questions. Columbia created the Diversity Initiative in the Provost’s Office, appointed Jean Howard as vice provost, and earmarked $15 million to diversify the Arts and Science faculty. The creation of the Initiative was the result of a series of faculty-led initiatives. First, the Commission on the Status of Women, of which Howard was the chair, released the “Pipeline Report” in November 2001. The report found “leaks” in the academic pipeline from Ph.D. programs to tenured faculty positions. That is, females in academia, beginning as Ph.D. candidates, somehow left the road to tenure at a higher rate than their male peers. The Commission then formed an alliance with minority faculty members because, as Howard notes, it was “cryingly obvious” that there were not enough minority or female faculty members. They presented their concerns to University President Bollinger and Provost Brinkley, and in the fall of 2004, the Diversity Initiative was born. The question is what, exactly, it will do.

The full article can be found here.

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