Sylvia Manning remembers the days when she walked into meetings and was mistaken for a secretary. That doesn’t happen anymore.
As chancellor of the University of Illinois-Chicago, Manning, 57, heads the largest university in the Chicago area, and symbolizes the increasing number of women at the highest levels of leadership–presidents and chancellors–in higher education. Presidents hold the highest rank, often overseeing a system of state universities, while chancellors are appointed to run individual schools within a university system.
At the University of Illinois system, women are well represented, with Manning at the helm of the Chicago campus, Nancy Cantor heading the Urbana-Champaign campus, and Naomi Lynn leading the Springfield campus for 10 years, until February, when she retired a year later than she had originally planned.
This trend is not restricted to Illinois: Sharon Brehm was named chancellor of the University of Indiana-Bloomington in March; Shirley Tilghman was named president of Princeton in July; and Ruth Simmons will be inaugurated as president of Brown University in October.
“This year has really been a banner year,” says the University of Indiana’s Brehm. “I think we are beginning to see a very large cultural change unfold.”
The roots of change go back a few years. Elizabeth Hoffman was named president of the University of Colorado system a year ago; Judith Rodin has been president of the University of Pennsylvania since 1994.
Mary Sue Coleman has been president of the University of Iowa since 1995; women currently hold top positions at three institutions in North Carolina (Duke, the University of North Carolina system, North Carolina State); and at three of the four university centers in the State University of New York system (Stony Brook, Binghamton and Albany). With more than 400 women presidents and chancellors now in higher education, this is by no means a comprehensive list.
But progress isn’t just a matter of lists and numbers. Women’s leadership can influence the overall climate at colleges and universities in sweeping and small ways, Brehm says.
“Women are more egalitarian, democratic or consultative in their leadership styles,” Brehm says. “They are more comfortable saying, ‘Let’s all talk about this before we make the decision.’ There’s an openness and a desire to hear what other people have to say.”
Such openness can create a greater sense of community on campuses, educational leaders say.
Victoria Chou, dean of the College of Education and on the UIC faculty since 1978, has witnessed the influx of women leaders and has noticed the effects of more diversity in a room.
“The conversation is different, and the process is different,” she says. “It’s a much more stimulating environment intellectually when you’re not all singing the same song.”
Surveys and studies are charting women’s climb in higher education. Nationally, according to the most recent survey conducted by the American Council on Education, 19.3 percent of all college and university presidents and chancellors were women in 1998. Of the newly hired presidents and chancellors, 25 percent were female.
Though these numbers come nowhere close to parity among leaders in education, compared with the figures fromACE’s 1986 survey, they look good; then, only 9.5 percent of women were college or university presidents.
And though the number of women leaders is still low compared with the number of men, the numbers of women faculty are higher. According to a study from the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of women among postsecondary faculty increased to 39 percent from 32 percent between 1987 and 1999.
Those women faculty eventually could ascend through the educational hierarchy.
“Now you have more women with the qualifications and expertise in the pipeline than was the case earlier,” says Claire Van Ummersen, vice president and director of the Office of Women in Higher Education at ACE, and former president of Cleveland State University. “So they’re being, if you will, primed, and when opportunities come, they’re ready.”
A more open culture
Brehm believes one reason women already have gained greater status is that higher education tends to be more progressive than many other fields.
“I think higher education has been more open to diversity of all kinds in its leadership structure,” she says. “The private sector has been somewhat more conservative.”
David Broski, president of Bradley University in Peoria and chancellor of UIC before Manning, concurs. “I think higher education is on the leading edge,” he says. “I don’t think you see the same thing in corporate leadership, and I don’t think you see the same thing on corporate boards. Those numbers are still very, very small compared to higher education.”
UIC is a good example of women’s advancement. Half of the 16 deans on that campus are women, as is the interim provost, Charlotte Tate. This, several longtime faculty members say, is in part due to Broski serving as provost, then chancellor at the school–a total of 10 years. He is credited with bringing in more women deans than UIC had ever seen, according to Chou.
But Broski says he didn’t hire women simply because they were women. “I don’t know that I deserve any great credit for cultivating women in leadership roles,” he says. “We tried to look for the best possible dean candidates when I was provost and the best possible vice chancellor candidates when I was chancellor. Some of them happened to be women.”
Still, Broski acknowledges that he is sensitive to discrimination against women.
“I have two daughters and I am very, very much interested in making sure they get all the opportunities that would be handed down to my sons if I had sons. So maybe I am a little more sensitive to these issues because I have a lot of females in my household.”
Some thorny issues to resolve
Higher education hasn’t resolved all gender-equity issues, however.
Pamela Haag, director of research at the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, says a disproportionate number of women fill part-time or adjunct faculty positions at colleges and universities. These are typically untenured positions.
“The pay is dramatically less, as is the prestige,” Haag says.
Another significant issue, Haag says, is that women are considerably under-represented in certain subject areas, such as the sciences and engineering. Without role models and mentors, women have been discouraged from staying in these traditionally male fields. The good news is that the number of women entering graduate programs in the sciences is increasing.
But perhaps one of the most pressing challenges for women in academia is a problem other career women share: Balancing work and home life, especially if they have children.
Brehm thinks family issues are the next set of issues to be addressed. “That’s where the society really lags behind now,” she says. “Women are advancing, but many, many families live very difficult lives. I think society has not looked at that carefully enough.”
Manning says she’s glad her children are grown, considering the demands of her position as UIC chancellor. But even as a younger faculty member, it was a struggle to find time for everything, she says. “When I was with the children, I was completely focused. And when I was working, I was working.”
Chou tried to maintain those same lines of focus. “When the kids were little,” she says, “and I started being an administrator, I said to myself, `OK, this time when I go home is totally theirs. I’m not going to touch it at all in terms of work.’ And then the second they went to bed, I was back on the work track. You make up these rules for yourself because otherwise you just go nuts. You have to corner off pieces of your life.”
Tenure track’s timing
Haag says institutions should address the fact that just when women are competing for tenure, which grants qualifying faculty job security, they are generally in their prime child-bearing years. She suggests that the tenure-track clock, usually set for the first six years of a junior faculty member’s appointment, be adjusted for the time women may take off to have children.
Allowing time to raise children must become a matter of policy at colleges and universities, she says.
“This is not just an individual question, it’s an institutional question. In some ways academia is worse than the corporate world because its hours of work aren’t demarcated. Because of that, the job can become all-consuming.”
Meanwhile, though there is still much progress to be made for women in higher education, female leadership on college and university campuses likely will build momentum.
Brehm likens women’s presence and ascent on campuses to a snowball effect. “The effect becomes broader and deeper and more meaningful,” she says.
Similar to the case at the University of Wisconsin, where president Katharine Lyall recently appointed Cora Bagley Marrett as chief academic officer, Princeton president Shirley Tilghman named Amy Gutmann to be provost at Princeton.
“As more and more people do this [promote women],” says Brehm, “it becomes more and more easy. I was very interested to see that the new president of Princeton appointed a female provost. I want to send her a note to say, `Bravo.'”
