ADVERTISEMENT
Resignation over Gender Inequalities Withdrawn01-31-07 | News

Resignation over Gender Inequalities Withdrawn




img
 

Martha Schwartz (center) with colleagues at the 2006 ASLA meeting in Minneapolis.


The Harvard Crimson and Inside Higher Ed.com report that Harvard Adjunct Professor Martha Schwartz, the founder of Martha Schwartz Partners, with offices in Cambridge, Mass. and London, sent a letter of resignation on Jan. 12, 2006 to the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), citing the landscape architecture department?EUR??,,????'???s gender inequities in female tenure hires. (Editor?EUR??,,????'???s note: LASN?EUR??,,????'???s cover feature for the Aug. 2006 issue (?EUR??,,????'??Dublin?EUR??,,????'???s Docklands?EUR??,,????'??) was the work of Martha Schwartz Partners.)

However, Harvard?EUR??,,????'???s Interim President Derek Bok and GSD Dean Alan Altshuler, have convinced her to stay on. Altshuler noted that over the last 12 years, six of the 14 full professor GSD appointments have been women, and since his tenure as dean, July 2004, all three professorial appointments, two in architecture, one in urban planning, went to women. Altshuler said Schwartz is being considered for a tenured professor-in-practice position that does not include any other candidates.

A report by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences in Oct. 2006, however, found that only 20 percent of tenure-track offers at the university?EUR??,,????'???s main undergraduate college last year were women, a decline from 40 percent in 2004-5. Altshuler said the landscape architecture department has also started a competitive search for up to two tenured full-professor positions, and two of the five finalists in that search are women.

Martha Schwartz reports when she was a student in the Harvard landscape architecture program in 1977, half the students were women; now it is 70 percent. Today the landscape architecture department has six full-tenured professors, all men, and 11 other non-visiting faculty members, four of whom are female, including Schwartz.

In 1992, Schwartz had the opportunity to became the landscape architecture department?EUR??,,????'???s first tenured female hire, but could not accept the position because of her practice responsibilities. She accepted instead to teach as an adjunct professor, alongside two male counterparts. Since then, Harvard created the ?EUR??,,????'??professor-in-practice?EUR??,,????'?? position to make the tenured position more flexible for the professional commitments of practicing landscape architects. Both her male colleagues won tenured positions under the professor-in-practice program.

img