The Ivy League’s senior leadership is overwhelmingly white and heavily male, data from the Education Department and from the eight colleges themselves show. Despite decades of antidiscrimination policies and affirmations of equality, there’s still little racial and ethnic diversity at the top at many of the colleges.
That’s not because there aren’t qualified minority applicants, critics say. They’re tired of hearing that excuse. A major issue, they say, is how elite colleges are defining the word “qualified.”
Women, to be sure, have made major gains at these colleges in the past 10 years, and now hold the president’s job at five Ivy League institutions. A 2011 survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, which broadly defines administrators to include executive, administrative, and managerial staff, shows that women held a majority of such jobs at five of the eight Ivies. But blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and American Indians were represented in much smaller numbers, except at Columbia University, which reported much higher numbers of minority administrators than at the other Ivies.
Many minority scholars and other observers have expressed impatience that the Ivies—for all their wealth, influence, and prestige—have not done more to diversify the upper ranks of their leadership, especially at a time when the racial and ethnic composition of the student population across academe is browning. The reasons are varied and complex. They include the leaky pipeline of minority academics; the culture, comfort, and “fit” of job candidates; and, perhaps most divisive of all, as the University of Pennsylvania saw recently, conflicting opinions on what it means to be “qualified.”
Nearly a year ago, Penn’s president, Amy Gutmann, hosted a “diversity dinner” at her home that fell apart when she used the word “qualified” during a heated exchange with minority professors who had questioned her hiring record. Time has not lessened the sting for Tukufu Zuberi and a few others who were at the dinner. “Black folks are tired of hearing white people say they aren’t qualified for something,” says Mr. Zuberi, a professor of race relations and chair of the sociology department at Penn.
Some academics, in and beyond the Ivies, say the term “qualified” is a loaded code word with many functions: It acts as a smoke screen that enables discrimination while deflecting blame from perpetrators. In the same way that the term “character” was used in the past to defend quota systems for Jews in the Ivy League, “qualified” feeds stereotypes of members of minorities as less intelligent, experienced, and capable, while discrediting affirmative action and diversity policies. Some people argue that the term allows university officials to publicly advocate for diversity and inclusion through window dressing.
“There’s a lot of talk about ‘fit,’” says Mary Frances Berry, a former chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and a professor of American social thought at Penn, who has also served as chancellor and provost at other universities. “No one ever overtly says, ‘We don’t want minorities.’ That would be tacky.”
Some people argue that the term “qualified” is less about talent and skills than about whom administrators feel comfortable with socially and intellectually—that is, candidates who do familiar research, who attended the same colleges, who move in similar circles, and who understand the campus culture. By and large, administrators act as gatekeepers who insulate decision makers, these critics say. Only those deemed worthy enough have access to the inner sanctum. A critical mass of highly competent minority administrators, especially at elite colleges, could upset the status quo, they say.
But others insist that being a qualified Ivy League administrator is about “compatibility” and having an established record of experience and success at peer institutions. The lack of diversity in the upper ranks, these observers say, is a byproduct of a highly selective hiring process and a pipeline that contains too few minority candidates.
Data show that the hiring of blacks and members of other minority groups for a broad range of professional staff and administrative positions at the Ivy institutions lags behind that of women.
Over the past two decades, women have broken through the glass ceiling—half of the Ivies, all except Dartmouth College and Columbia, Cornell, and Yale Universities, have had female presidents. (Dartmouth currently has a female interim president.) Ruth J. Simmons, a former president of Brown University, dubbed “the Jackie Robinson of the Ivy League,” remains the first and only African-American to have held the top position, while Dartmouth appointed Jim Y. Kim, a male who was the first Asian-American president of an Ivy institution.
Now that Ms. Simmons and Mr. Kim have stepped down, some observers say it may be a long time before another minority president is appointed. Historically, it is rare for institutions to replace a minority member with another once he or she leaves, says Bryan Cook, a former director of the American Council on Education’s Center for Policy Analysis.
“Behind closed curtains, people say, ‘We’ve been there, tried that,’ and then they go back to business as usual,” Mr. Cook says. He oversaw a recent report titled “On the Pathway to the Presidency,” which tracked leadership at 149 four-year colleges and found little change in the racial and ethnic composition of presidents over the past 25 years. In 2011 the share of presidents from racial or ethnic minority groups was 13 percent, up from 8 percent in 1986, the report stated.
According to Education Department data from 2011, women outnumbered their male counterparts in professional administrative jobs at a majority of the Ivies. Women held 69 percent of such positions at Columbia, and more than half at Brown, Harvard, Penn, and Yale.
Of the 238,718 people who held professional administrative jobs at colleges nationwide in 2011, 78 percent were white, 9 percent black, 5 percent Hispanic, 3 percent Asian, and less than 1 percent Pacific Islander or American Indian. Those percentages were nearly identical at private four-year colleges. While Columbia had the highest percentage of minority administrators in the Ivies—42 percent—data for the other Ivies fell below the national average in all categories except Asians. Whites held more than 90 percent of professional administrative jobs at Dartmouth and Cornell and more than 80 percent of those at Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Penn, and Yale, the data show. And it gets whiter at the very top ranks.
Phone calls to Ivy League institutions to determine their current level of diversity in positions of dean and above produced a range of numbers and some incomplete responses. Cornell reported the largest number of high-ranking minority administrators—seven out of 42. Dartmouth said its current numbers did not demonstrate its commitment to diversity because some high-ranking officials were interim. Instead, the university asked The Chronicle to measure its diversity by counting the four minority administrators and seven women appointed during Mr. Kim’s three-year tenure, which ended in 2012. Columbia reported that three of its 20 administrators are minority-group members, all of them black, while Penn reported one black and one Hispanic out of 31.
Brown has eight and Yale has 10 top officials, and each institution reports having one minority member among them. Harvard would not provide a total number of top administrators or raw numbers for minority groups, but it reported that 81 percent were white. Before the recent loss of its first African-American dean, Evelynn M. Hammonds, who was involved in authorizing secret searches of employees’ e-mail accounts as part of a cheating investigation and is returning to her faculty position, Harvard reported that 10 percent of its administrators were black, 6 percent Asian, and 3 percent Hispanic. Princeton said it had 27 administrators, of whom 12 were women and 19 percent were minorities.
Along with the data from the Education Department and reports from the Ivies themselves, The Chronicle collected photographs of the colleges’ senior administrators, which help illustrate the lack of racial and ethnic diversity at the top. The Chronicle included each institution’s president, provost, executive vice president, and senior administrators who report directly to any of those three leaders.
The question of diversity at the Ivies is a complex and sensitive one, as the colleges’ responses show. The Chronicle tried to get more information about diversity by asking individual administrators to identify their race and ethnicity, age, and gender. About one-third responded. Some took issue with what they saw as the limitations of the question. A middle-aged white male from Harvard said it did not capture the diversity that his Irish working-class background added, while a white lesbian administrator from Princeton said that adding sexuality, disability, and religion would provide a fuller picture of diversity.
But some people say such an expansion would produce a watered-down version of diversity.
Maybe the administrators are “signaling their disagreement with prioritizing racial inclusion more than the other factors, or they don’t want anyone to see what the data on race really are,” says Penn’s Ms. Berry.
The picture of what qualified looks like is often colored by biases and stereotypes, academics say. Frank Dobbin, a sociology professor at Harvard who studies inequality and bias, says the usage of the term has shifted since the 1970s and 1980s, when corporate managers promised to consider all qualified candidates for jobs and not practice reverse discrimination. “The word ‘qualified’ guaranteed that merit would be the deciding factor,” he says. Today in academe, “the term has been used to excuse the failure to diversify the faculty, as in ‘We would hire women faculty in engineering, if there were qualified applicants.’”
“Qualified is in the eye of the beholder,” says Boyce Watkins, a former finance professor and now scholar in residence at Syracuse University who writes frequently about the lack of diversity in academe. “When people say they can’t find qualified minorities, they’re basically saying, ‘We have this job that has been done by dozens of white people and at the same time we can’t find one person of color on this earth to do this job.’”
Mr. Watkins, who has sat on faculty search committees, says that when qualified minority candidates are interviewed, those doing the hiring “will nitpick and find a reason why that person isn’t a good fit.”
Mr. Cook, the former director at ACE, adds that since so few minority-group members ascend to top positions, if one makes a misstep, people are likely to call the qualifications of the entire group into question, as well as the worthiness of diversity initiatives. The same is not true for white administrators, Mr. Cook and others say.
Rena I. Seltzer, a personal coach for academics who is writing a book about the experiences of female administrators, says broadening application pools leads to diversity in hiring. “Research shows that if there is only one person of color in a hiring pool, then they are judged according to stereotypes about the group rather than as an individual,” she says. “But if the hiring pool includes multiple minorities, then they are judged on an individual basis.”
A senior administrator at Columbia who requested anonymity says the term “qualified” means much more than what is on a candidate’s CV. “You have to have the proper uniform and confidence, but black candidates can’t have too much self-confidence, because that can be threatening and take people out of their comfort zone,” the administrator says. “The fear is about you dispelling cultural myths about racial inferiority, and so the goal is to not scare anybody in the room.”
Background plays a role. “At the Ivies, it means, can you move in these privileged spaces?” says a former Princeton administrator who is now at another Ivy institution and asked not to be identified. “Can you understand all the ways power moves, how decisions get made, the culture of the environment? Particularly at the Ivies, there’s generally a belief that you can’t understand it unless you come from it.”
It’s important for female and minority administrators not to be obtrusive or seem entitled, says Frances M. Rosenbluth, deputy provost for the social sciences and for faculty development and diversity at Yale. And candidates who work in the fields of gender and race studies, or come from a historically black college, are viewed with caution, she says. “People are afraid of being blamed or sued for discrimination,” she says. “Minorities have to signal ‘I’m a dominant-culture-friendly person. I’m not going to make your life miserable by coming in here and turning your organization into the likeness of me at the expense of people like you.’”
Penn’s diversity dinner last spring became a lightning rod for discussion about what “qualified” really means. About 35 faculty members, some of them full professors with global reputations, listened to the provost and president summarize equity reports and “sing the praises of the diversity achieved on campus,” says Kenneth L. Shropshire, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at Penn’s Wharton School. When someone brought up the lack of minority faculty members at the institution, Ms. Gutmann responded that she had little control over whom departments hire.
Grace Kao, a Chinese-American professor of sociology, pushed back, as she recalled in an e-mail describing the conversation. “You have direct control over hires in the upper administration,” she said. “As you know, we will soon have a search for the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. Are you going to take seriously minority candidates?”
Ms. Gutmann’s response didn’t sit well with her dinner guests.
The president said that she would love to see a person of color in that dean position, and that she was committed to diversity, “but she would not just bring in someone who is not qualified,” recalls Camille Z. Charles, a professor of sociology and director of Penn’s Center for Africana Studies. Ms. Charles says she asked herself at the time: “Did I really just hear that?” She adds, “Why would there even be the need to talk about qualified? We don’t say we need qualified applicants to recruit white males. It’s assumed.”
Vivian L. Gadsden, a professor of child development and education, says her ears pricked up and she saw some eye-rolling around the tables. Mr. Zuberi, who considers Ms. Gutmann a friend, says a ripple of unease swept across the room. “People were shocked,” he says.
Ms. Kao and Mr. Zuberi thought their president had misspoken, since Ms. Gutmann has made diversity a theme of her presidency. Under her tenure, student diversity has risen nearly 50 percent, and minority scholars made up 18 percent of the faculty in 2009, up from 16 percent in 2006, according to a 2010 report. Her Diversity Action Plan, created in 2011, calls for $100-million to be spent over five years on recruitment, faculty development, and creating pipeline programs to increase the presence of underrepresented groups.
But what people heard in the room that evening, Mr. Zuberi says, was that “none of you are qualified to be a dean.” Some professors left the dinner with a bad taste in their mouths. But they decided to wait to see if a person of color would be hired for the open deanship position. After all, Ms. Gutmann had told them, “a show beats a tell.” When a white male was appointed in January, some saw his appointment as a slap in the face.
A handful of senior black professors wrote a column called “Guess Who’s (Not) Coming to Dinner” in The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper, early this year, criticizing Ms. Gutmann and pledging to boycott this year’s diversity dinner. Ms. Berry sent an e-mail to the paper calling the president “tone deaf” on the issue of employment diversity. “She seems to think that diversity and inclusion means diluting credentials,” Ms. Berry wrote.
Ms. Charles says the situation could have been quelled if Ms. Gutmann had said she misspoke. “The failure to admit gave people the impression that this was not a mistake but a deeply felt perception,” Ms. Charles says.
Ms. Gutmann did not respond to requests for an interview, citing scheduling constraints. But a representative shared a column she and other top officials wrote in the student newspaper in April, which stated, “We are encouraged that progress in diversity has been significant in many areas at Penn. In areas where there has been less progress, we are absolutely determined to do more. We are also redoubling our efforts by improving search processes and in myriad other ways, to achieve greater diversity in our administrative and staff ranks as well.”
A lack of minority scholars in the faculty pipeline, the typical path to administrative opportunities, is another factor affecting diversity in leadership.
Ansley A. Abraham, director of the Southern Regional Education Board’s State Doctoral Scholars Program, which helps minority Ph.D.'s find tenure-track jobs, says the number of minority administrators at four-year public colleges is outpacing the number of minority faculty members. According to a report published in 2011 by the board, in 2009-10 about 10 percent of full-time administrators were black and 4.5 percent were Hispanic. In that year, more than 5 percent of full-time faculty were black and less than 5 percent Hispanic. A closer look shows that 32 percent of those black administrators—and 55 percent of black faculty—were at historically black colleges.
“You’ve got a numbers problem,” says Mr. Abraham. “You don’t even begin to have enough minority faculty who could possibly move up the ranks to the administrative levels.”
Mr. Cook says much of the racial diversity in administration is concentrated in student-affairs and diversity offices. “Rarely do people in these positions ascend to senior leadership positions on campus,” he says. Others suggest another reason there are so few minority senior administrators in the Ivy League and elsewhere: A critical mass of these leaders would allow for the success of larger numbers of minority students—something that elite colleges and many other predominantly white institutions, they maintain, aren’t truly interested in.
Many of the Ivies “steal” minorities from one another instead of bringing in new blood, says Mr. Abraham. Others, like Harvard’s Mr. Dobbin, say it’s time for institutions to expand their scope beyond the traditional candidates. “Maybe places like Harvard and Penn should think outside the box and hire administrators from historically black colleges and universities,” he suggests.
If the Ivies really want to diversify, they can afford to do it, Mr. Abraham says. “The fact that they don’t have many minority administrators makes you question whether or not they really want them.”
Corrections (6/10/2013, 2:50 p.m.): This article originally misreported that all the Ivy League institutions except Dartmouth College and Yale University have had female presidents. Columbia and Cornell Universities have also never had a female president. And the article originally reported that a white lesbian administrator at Cornell had said that adding sexuality, disability, and religion would provide a fuller picture of diversity. The administrator was at Princeton University. The article has been corrected to reflect those changes.