Many say liberal-arts colleges provide a better place for women to thrive
Deborah S. Gross doesn’t have a fancy lab, a $1-million grant, or a bevy of graduate students to do her bidding. But she doesn’t consider herself an also-ran as a scientist, even if a lot of big-time researchers might disagree.
As an assistant professor of chemistry at Carleton College, Ms. Gross knows exactly who she is -- a small-time scientist at a small-size college. And she has news for all those researchers holed up at Harvard, Berkeley, and Caltech: This is a life she wanted, not a life she settled for.
That might sound like bravado. After all, everybody knows you can’t do science -- not real science, anyway -- without a fat budget and plenty of postdoctoral students to check your petri dishes. The only scientists who pull the born-again-teacher routine, the critics in lab coats say, are the ones who couldn’t land a research gig to begin with.
Actually, says Ms. Gross, she wasn’t seeking the big time -- and she’s not alone. A growing number of female scientists are turning their backs on the research institutions where they trained, and are signing up for jobs at places where so-called “serious” scientists, like their mentors, would never set foot.
The trend doesn’t surprise Geri Richmond, a chaired professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon. “Twenty years ago, the question was, ‘Can I do it?’” Today, she says, there’s a history of women in elite science departments, albeit a short one. Now, “the question is, ‘Do I want to?’”
Apparently, a lot of women don’t. Take chemistry. In 1995, according to the American Chemical Society, 23 percent of the female assistant professors in the field worked at Ph.D.-granting institutions. By 2000, that proportion had eked its way up to just 25 percent. But at bachelor’s colleges, in 1995, 37 percent of the assistant professors in chemistry were women; by 2000, 42 percent were.
Then there’s physics. In 1994, says the American Institute of Physics, 7 percent of the female assistant professors in the field worked at liberal-arts colleges, and 5 percent at research universities. Four years later, the proportion had climbed to 11 percent at bachelor’s institutions. At research institutions, the figure had only crept up to 6 percent.
Biology doesn’t have one overarching society that tracks the numbers, but there’s lots of anecdotal evidence in the discipline, and it all indicates the same thing: The liberal-arts hiring trend is happening there, too.
Lingering sex discrimination may be one reason that big institutions aren’t hiring more women. But it’s not the only reason, experts say. Self-selection is involved, too.
Ms. Gross certainly selected a different kind of life from what she’d known. She earned her doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley and did a postdoc at U.C. Riverside. But when it came time to go on the job market, she says, she didn’t even bother mailing her resume to Ph.D. institutions. “I wasn’t interested in that kind of rat race.”
She has other interests, though -- teaching, advising, even research, as long as it helps her students. “In my mind, the research is a way to learn the chemistry,” she says.
Female scientists are going to small colleges by design, not default, for precisely those kinds of reasons, says Mary Frank Fox, a sociologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Six years ago, she surveyed 3,800 doctoral students in chemistry, computer science, electrical engineering, microbiology, and physics, and asked them what kind of career they preferred -- research universities, teaching colleges, or industry. Industry was the top choice, appealing to 40 percent of both men and women. But when it came to academe, nearly 25 percent of the women said they preferred to work at a teaching college rather than a research university, compared with 16 percent of the men. Nearly 30 percent of women expressed a preference for research institutions, versus 40 percent of men.
Of course, Ms. Fox points out, “people prefer things in the context of what’s possible,” and some women seem to think that the odds are more in their favor at a teaching institution. It’s hardly a secret that many female scientists at research institutions are discontent and disaffected. Only last year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued a report acknowledging that women there were the victims of widespread discrimination, getting shortchanged on everything from salaries to laboratory space.
“Large universities are not carefully examining their own cultures to see what might be going on that’s making women say, ‘Boy, I wouldn’t want to do that,’” says Tricia Ferrett, an associate professor of chemistry at Carleton.
Is it really a surprise, Ms. Ferrett asks, that 10 out of the 12 top job applicants in a recent chemistry search at Carleton were women, while research universities have to scramble to get female scientists into their applicant pools? Sure, she observes, there are drawbacks to small-college science: self-doubt, snide comments from big-time researchers, a sense of marginalization in the profession at large. And small-college jobs have pressures, too -- the constant need to juggle courses, committees, advising, and research. It’s a fragmented existence, not a focused one.
That said, Ms. Ferrett still thinks it’s a better life. At liberal-arts institutions, she says, women can actually win tenure, enjoy teaching, do research, and start a family before needing amniocentesis.
And the glass ceiling? “I think it might be softer -- a gelatinous ceiling rather than a glass ceiling,” says Jan Serie, a biologist at Macalester College and dean of the natural-sciences division.
Numbers have a lot to do with it, she explains. There may not be a crowd of female scientists anywhere in academe, but at least at small colleges there’s a community. In the Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Pathology Program on the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus, one out of the 21 professors in the immunology track, where Ms. Serie earned her Ph.D., are women. In her own department, the body count is almost evenly split between the sexes, with four women and five men. Before a spate of recent faculty moves, women were in the majority.
Those role models make a difference, on both a personal and a professional front. Sandra L. Burkett, an assistant professor of chemistry, ditched a tenure-track post at M.I.T. a year ago in favor of a job at Amherst College. People still can’t come to terms with her leap, she says. If they could, why would they keep forwarding her mail to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst?
But Amherst -- the college, not the university -- had one very big draw for Ms. Burkett: Patricia B. O’Hara, a female full professor in the same department.
“She was the first person I had met who I could look at and say, ‘This is who I want to be down the road.’ She’s gotten tenure. She has a good research reputation. She has a family. And she’s a nice person. I hadn’t met any women at M.I.T. who I could say, ‘This is who I want to be in 20 years.’ I found that very discouraging.”
Many of the scientists Ms. Burkett knew at M.I.T., she adds, were on at least their second marriage. Ms. Burkett is on her first and would like it to be her last.
Anne J. Cox, a physicist at Eckerd College, is on her first child and doesn’t think it will doom her tenure bid this year. “Women say you need to wait until you have tenure to have a family.” She refused. “I didn’t want an institution to determine my personal choices to that extent.”
So far, Ms. Cox has no qualms. She’s had “wonderful support” from Eckerd: maternity leave, a reduced teaching load for a semester, encouragement to bring her daughter to campus. “She went everywhere with me.” And she means everywhere -- office hours, job-candidate interviews, appointments with the dean. Ms. Cox even nursed her baby during faculty meetings.
That’s encouraging to Beth Forys, an assistant professor of environmental science at Eckerd who has published 10 papers and won 10 grants. She had a baby in July. As a result, she’s teaching one course in the fall, and her committee assignments are nil. “I’m working on a really reduced load,” she says.
So is Elizabeth A. Howell, an associate professor of biology at Calvin College. In 1998, she took a month off from work, flew to China, and adopted a daughter. Ms. Howell has been working on a reduced load -- it’s now at 70 percent -- for the past two years.
“When I was at Harvard and Northwestern” as a graduate student and postdoc, “people were there all day,” she recalls. “A family can be held hostage to a lab.”
No one is holding a gun to her head at Calvin. The pressures are entirely different from those at Harvard, for example. She’s not expected to secure big grants or publish a pile of papers. A couple of articles should suffice, and small grants will do. But her teaching had better be topnotch and her service record stellar, or she can kiss tenure good-bye.
At small colleges, more than one consideration comes into play when you come up for tenure. Research is just one ingredient, although it is part of the recipe.
“It’s not like we’re just allowed to do research,” says Ms. Gross, the Carleton chemist. “We’re able to.” She has 13 articles to her credit and just spent two weeks in a tunnel in Berkeley collecting data on aerosol particles for No. 14.
At a small school, “you’re in the lab doing the work,” says Ann T.S. Taylor a biochemist at Wabash College. “You’re not relegated to a desk writing grants and papers and dealing with the bureaucracy of running a big lab.” She worked in one of those big labs during her graduate-school days. In five years, she saw her professor conduct only one experiment. “The graduate students set everything up,” she recalls. And the professor? “He watched.”
Is it tougher to get some of that research done at a liberal-arts college? Certainly. Nine months of the year are chewed up with classes and committees. Your research assistants -- all two or three of them -- are green undergraduates.
“I could be scooped in a month by someone with a graduate student and a couple of postdocs,” says Donna M. Bozzone, chairwoman of the biology department at Saint Michael’s College.
Back at Princeton, where she earned her Ph.D., Ms. Bozzone studied gene progression in social amoebas -- a “hot topic.” Now she works on something a little cooler: biological problems in the same organism. “It’s a neat little problem, but the world isn’t waiting on the answer.”
And that’s OK. “At a small school, you can do -- and this isn’t a pejorative -- small science,” she explains. “Big science is the human-genome project. Hundreds of people are engaged in it. But there are a lot of questions that can be answered in a single-person shop.”
Does anyone listen to the answers that come out of a small-college shop, or that are produced by graduate students planning on working in one? Years ago, when Ms. Bozzone was a postdoc, she applied for a grant. The reviewer complimented her proposal but questioned why someone who wanted to teach needed to do a postdoc at all. She didn’t get the money. When Ms. Bozzone resubmitted the proposal, she left out any mention of her career plans. The funds came through. “I’m a scientist, so I can’t make a conclusion from one experiment,” she says. But she has her suspicions.
So does Ms. Serie, the Macalaster biologist. Years ago, when she told her Ph.D. adviser that she wanted to work at a small college, he replied that she “‘might as well retire.’ There was no acknowledgment that this was a valid thing to do.”
Affirmation hasn’t been fast in coming. In the late 80’s, Ms. Serie attended an immunology conference. She was the only small-college scientist there. No one talked to her -- “It was like I was invisible.” Finally, someone spied her nametag. “‘You’re from Macalester,” the professor said. “‘Don’t they do a lot of drugs there?’”
“It was hard,” she says.
It still is. Two years ago, Ms. Serie began studying the immune response to viral infections. To learn more about viruses, she spent a month working in the lab of a major research scientist -- who suggested that Ms. Serie do a basic search of the literature to learn more about immune responses. Ms. Serie already had a cabinet full of papers in her office.
“She would never mention to a research colleague that they should do a literature review,” Ms. Serie says. That would have been a given. “But she never really took me seriously as a scientist. I still don’t think she undestands that I have a research program and publish in the same journals that she does.”
It can be hard to get published from a small college, though. In the late 80’s, one of Ms. Serie’s articles was rejected by a journal. She made some changes, including adding to the title page the name of a co-author from a research institution. “It’s a strategy,” she says. And it worked.
A small college has its advantages. But it might not be as warm and fuzzy a place as some women think, says Ms. Richmond, the Oregon chemist. She left a tenure-track job at Bryn Mawr College for Oregon years ago because she got tired of shutting down her lab every time she went out of town. Now she has an endowed chair and a family as well.
She nursed her babies in the office, traveled with them, even set up a nursery down the hall from her department office. “There’s a perspective that if you go to a small college, you have more freedom,” she says. “But I could decide tomorrow that I’m going to take off a month,” and her lab would keep running without her. That’s a luxury most small-college scientists don’t have.
The stakes are higher for Ms. Richmond. Her missteps are more public; the expectations for grants and publishing are higher. But scientists at small colleges have to publish, too, she says, and come tenure time, their records are sometimes compared with those of their colleagues at research universities. Ms. Richmond can attest to that. “It’s not a fair comparison,” the professor says, but she’s been asked to make it.
Some women say they have paid the price. There was a notoriously ugly tenure dispute in biology at Vassar College, and one in chemistry at Smith College. Both involved women who had tried to slow down the tenure clock because of children. Vassar won the case, and the lawsuit against Smith was dropped.
“In statistics of small numbers, these isolated cases take on a lot of importance,” Ms. Richmond says.
But other things are important, too. Eight years ago, Lori Bettison-Varga passed up a job at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington to work at the College of Wooster, where she is now a tenured associate professor of geology and the mother of three children, two of them born before she got tenure.
Sometimes Ms. Bettison-Varga suffers from self-doubt, but most if it is self-imposed. “Face it, we were trained at research places,” she says. “We have that monkey on our backs. If you think you should produce at the same rate as people at research institutions, you end up playing head games on yourself.”
Ms. Bettison-Varga has played a few herself. Not long ago, she won a five-year “Young Investigator” grant from the National Science Foundation, an award typically given to people doing “cutting-edge research.” She won it because of the interplay between her teaching and her research, but some days she still holds her work against a “cutting edge” measuring stick.
“I carry around with me, ‘Gee, you really let N.S.F. down because you didn’t get 10 papers out of this grant.’” She published four and is working on the fifth. Chances are she’ll finish. She has been given the next year off to focus on research.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Page: A12