TAC fights subtraction through division

Cluefon
    By Dan Dudis

Yale College has recently been blessed with the formation of yet another student organization, the Tenure Action Coalition (TAC), created to ensure that Yale works to make its faculty more diverse. In a leaflet distributed at dining halls, TAC draws attention to the fact that women currently comprise 11 percent of Yale's tenured faculty and minorities account for just over six percent of the same group.

TAC members argue that the overwhelmingly white male nature of our tenured professors denies students the top-notch education that we came here seeking. Yet judging by many statements included in TAC's dubiously titled leaflet, "The Facts On Tenure At Yale," its real focus is not on improving our educations, but on developing a quota-like tenure review system. So let's take a stroll down TAC's walk of shame.

"How many great instructors can you name who've been denied tenure and left Yale before you could have them in class? Lynne Huffer, Diane Kunz, Wayne Koestenbaum, Sylvia Maxfield, Carla Kaplan...." TAC seems to be exercising selective memory in this instance. During my three years at Yale, it has been more often a male face gracing the cover of the Yale Daily News, accompanying the headline "Much-loved professor denied tenure, to leave Yale in the spring." But apparently these white males, excellent though they may be, don't count in TAC's rainbow world.

"Providing for the needs of a `diverse student body' must include supplying appropriate role models in all departments and at all levels." This is perhaps the most disturbing of all TAC's assertions. The belief that people, bright people at that, can only interact with others of their own gender or ethnic group is simply appalling. To insinuate that only female professors are able to act as role models for female students and that only black professors are able to act as role models for black students should be deeply shocking to a pluralistic society such as ours.

What is even more surprising is that such a statement is found in a purportedly liberal pamphlet. Whatever happened to '60s-style liberalism, with its dream of a color-blind society? Replacing it with TAC's views on race is an insult to all who fought and died for civil rights in the '60s. I would imagine that TAC's views are not all that dissimilar from those of many unreconstructed South African Afrikaaners. If TAC is right, why not just go ahead and create separate schools for women and men, blacks and whites? I know I feel that immediate special bond whenever I see a white male professor walk into class--why should I have to be subjected to female professors to whom I am incapable of relating?

"Automatic review by an independent committee of each case in which a person of color or a woman is removed from the Equal Employment Opportunities Office [EEOO]-approved applicant pool for a full professorship" is TAC's first recommendation for changing the tenure review process. TAC does not believe that a body such as the EEOO represents enough of a commitment from the Administration. TAC falls into the trap of automatically assuming discriminatory malfeasance on the part of tenure-review committees whenever qualified female or minority applicants cannot be found.

By doing so, TAC's true motivations become crystal clear: the organization is not interested in ensuring students a top-notch education; it is interested in creating a tenure-review process that will create a quota-driven rainbow faculty, regardless of the consequences to the caliber of the Yale faculty.

I do not mean to suggest that females and minorities are somehow less qualified to be tenured. The simple fact is that women and minorities have only been receiving doctorates in large numbers during the past couple of decades. Considering the relatively advanced age of the Yale faculty, it is not surprising that there are so few tenured female and minority faculty members here. It will take time for female and minority professors who started teaching in the '70s and '80s to gain the necessary experience to become qualified for tenure. This is true for all young professors--regardless of gender or ethnicity.

In the end, it is TAC's entire premise that is at fault. It is absurd to suggest that the degree to which Yale's faculty reflects the population as a whole is in anyway tied to the quality of the education we receive. When I take organic chemistry, I couldn't care less about the professor's gender or ethnicity. All I want is a professor who is a good teacher and a brilliant scholar.

A person's gender or ethnicity has absolutely no bearing on his or her ability to teach any subject. If we make the fairly safe assumption that the current tenure review process is not discriminatory (on a liberal campus such as this one, it hard to believe that there is some sort of white male faculty conspiracy at work here--the special treatment of the Diane Kunz case argues for just the opposite), it should not matter what the gender or ethnic makeup of the faculty is. All we should be concerned about is that Yale hires into tenure the best scholars in each academic field, no matter what they look like.

Recent Herald Columns by this Columnist:
NOTE: SITE WILL APPEAR IN A NEW BROWSER WINDOW

• Cloning debate spawns greater concern, 2/6/98
• Entitlement Theory Hits Hollywood, 1/16/98

Back to Opinion...