How Many Women Teach in FAS? Harvard Won’t Say.

What do you call a university that claims to care about its female faculty but doesn’t report how many of them there are and is afraid to promote their research?

To help you answer this question, consider the following: In December, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences heard its annual report about faculty trends. That report used to include information about the faculty’s composition categorized by race and gender. This year’s presentation pointedly did not share such data, to the consternation of some faculty.

Then, last week, The Crimson reported that FAS had eliminated a “biannual symposium featuring tenure-track women’s research, citing legal concerns about hosting a single-gender event.” The symposium will now be “gender-neutral.”

FAS used to publicize the gender and race of the faculty, ostensibly because we believed that building a more diverse and equal community requires information about that diversity. The Standing Committee on Women’s mini-symposia helped female scholars gain recognition, something they often achieve more slowly than their male counterparts, as a recent quantitative study of elite physicists demonstrated.

I still believe building a diverse faculty should remain a goal on our campus and in higher education. I imagine most of my colleagues in FAS do, too.

Harvard’s cancellation of the tenure-track women’s symposium and its apparent refusal to share data on the racial and gender composition of the faculty are responses to national political forces. Rather than oppose the government’s assault on diversity, Harvard’s leadership — following advice from the Office of General Counsel — orders us to do the regime’s work for them. Meanwhile, peer institutions suffer direct attacks from increasingly authoritarian state and federal governments.

For example, Florida now forbids sociology professors in its public colleges from arguing that “most variations between men and women are learned traits and behaviors.” The University of Iowa plans to eliminate its Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies and African American Studies departments. And Texas A&M recently determined that passages from Plato’s “Symposium” — one of the most important texts in Western philosophy — could not appear on a syllabus, lest students encounter the proposition that gender is not binary.

Ironically (and predictably), this barrage of attacks reinforces one of the hard-won insights of women’s and gender studies: their subject is not marginal, but central. The regime demonstrates this every time they desperately assert patriarchal, heteronormative dominance.

Witness the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act which threatens to place an undue burden on married women trying to vote, the multiple cabinet secretaries who posted their gym workouts on social media last week, or Trump’s dismissive comments about the gold medal-winning U.S. Women’s Hockey Team. Harvard is not immune to this old-fashioned misogyny: the John Adams Society is now “effectively functioning as a single-sex organization.” Opinion writer Jamelle Bouie put it well: “Everything is gender.”

Why does any of this matter? Because nothing has changed in the composition of Harvard’s faculty to justify abandoning our commitment to racial diversity. The gender ratio in FAS does not suddenly warrant eliminating a modest seminar presenting scholarship by female tenure-track professors. The only difference between this year and last is that the federal government now interprets Title IX as a barrier to equity initiatives — and our Office of General Counsel seems to fear disobeying these edicts.

You may say, “But Harvard must follow the law.” I say this is not law; this is politics. Disastrously, Harvard’s leaders seem not to know the difference.

Harvard is demonstrating what historian of authoritarianism Timothy D. Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience.” “Individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want,” explains Snyder, “and then offer themselves without being asked.” History tells us clearly that catering to authoritarians is a fool’s errand. Yet Harvard does precisely this when it alters University practices to comply with the most stringent possible interpretation of the government’s discriminatory edicts.

Harvard’s refusal to continue its straightforward, longstanding approach to improving faculty diversity is a scandal and a total abdication of our claim to leadership in higher education. We must reverse these decisions and we must rouse ourselves from this posture of fear and submission.

To all those in Florida and Texas and Iowa and elsewhere who are being told, in no uncertain terms, that they and their work do not count anymore, Harvard, rather than censor itself, should say this: you are our colleagues, our teachers, our students, our friends. Your work is our work; your fight is our fight.

Instead, we cower in shameful silence.

So, what do you call a university that claims it cares about diversity but refuses to publicly measure or promote diversity among its faculty?

Trick question: it’s not a university. Because the only people we’re educating are the bigots in power. And the only thing we’re teaching them is that they can do whatever they want.

Derek Miller is a professor of English and the chair of the Standing Committee on Theater, Dance, and Media at Harvard.