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Useless and uselesser
Do we really need to know how to make what Sting eats for lunch?
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[01/07/00]

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[01/07/00]

False prophet
A new biography of Elijah Muhammad tackles tough issues, including the matter of blacks' collusion with the Japanese during World War II.
By Debra Dickerson
[01/06/00]

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"Moth Smoke" by Mohsin Hamid
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By Sudip Bose
[01/06/00]

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"The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro" by Antonio Tabucchi
A mystery of corruption, drug trafficking and decapitation by the Italian novelist.
By Marion Lignana Rosenberg
[01/05/00]

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Though top-ranked schools may theorize on equality and stage teach-ins on discrimination, an institution's structure speaks louder than the sum of its faculty's words. Tidball documents a direct correlation between the presence of high-level female faculty and the number of female graduates who earn a place in the Who's Who guide, earn research doctorates in the sciences or enter medical school.

If Tidball is correct, then America's "best schools" might not necessarily be the best schools for women. According to the U.S. Department of Education, men radically outnumber women as professors, assistants, and associates at America's most prestigious institutions. At Princeton and Yale, women hold an abysmal 15 percent of tenured positions. At Dartmouth, the fairest of the Ivies, they have 21 percent. Swarthmore and Amherst, ranked first and second among liberal arts colleges, have a tenured faculty that is 33-percent female, but at third-ranked Williams, the tenured female faculty is slightly over 25 percent.

Harvard's most recent affirmative action report states that women now make up 13.4 percent of the tenured faculty, "up a full percentage point," from last year. Yet prestige is still important to women, and "women's schools" are still looked at with a blend of suspicion and contempt. As a member of the first class of Harvard women who will not graduate from that institution with a degree from both Harvard and Radcliffe said, "Who wants to go to a girls' school when you can go to Harvard?" (Radcliffe ceased to exist as an undergraduate school last year; degrees used to be awarded jointly by Harvard and Radcliffe but now come from Harvard alone.)

But for many, the term "girls' school" still evokes a cloister where women learn to pour tea and manage marriage proposals: not exactly skills that prepare them to compete in what academia likes to call "the real world." Yet in an era when women's colleges are seen as anachronistic, it's worth asking exactly what "real" world our best coed schools are preparing students for.

Perhaps academia's bias against female students remains invisible to administrators, evaluators and even students themselves because sexist assumptions are like any other suppositions embedded in your native culture: Until you've traveled abroad, it's impossible to know you hold them. Yet amidst academia's sea of rationalizations, the all-female Wellesley proves that fairness and excellence are not incompatible. Not only does Wellesley consistently rank among U.S. News' top four liberal arts colleges in the country, it does so with 50-percent women faculty at every rank.

In 1995, in an article in the New York Times Business section headlined "How to Succeed ... Go to Wellesley," Judith Dobrzynski documented the disproportionate number of Wellesley alumnae among America's 390 high-ranking female Fortune 500 business executives. At least 17 of them had gone to Wellesley -- more than any other college. Dobrynski's explanation pointed to Wellesley's economics department and powerful alumnae network. But as Tidball's statistics demonstrate, the real reason may be the gender balance in the faculty.

Even for students steeped in post-feminist ennui, the experience of a fair world is startling. Arrika Finn, who transferred to Wellesley from St. Olaf's College, said she was immediately surprised by how much more her male professors at Wellesley respected and recommended their female colleagues. Then she was annoyed at her shock.

For Ruth Simmons, the first African-American president of Smith College, a junior year at Wellesley was the deciding factor in becoming a professor. Simmons' experience is not unusual: According to Tidball, females who attend women's colleges go on to earn two to three times the number of advanced degrees as those who attend co-ed schools.

Because I loved excelling as the only girl in my high school advanced placement physics class, I chose Wellesley for its excellent science program. I intended to become a nuclear physicist. I thought I'd just ignore the women's college thing. Then I stepped into my first physics class and my heart dropped as I scanned a sea of female faces. It had never occurred to me that I loved physics not for its elegant equations, but because the physics classroom was the only place I went where men had no choice but to respect me.

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