A Charge of Sex Discrimination

The College may be on the verge of a long journey through the judicial system, as defendant in a law suit involving discrimination on the basis of sex. The journey could be as costly as it is long, and the trail is crowded with other institutions in the same predicament.

Joan Smith, an associate professor of sociology when she left last Spring to accept a tenured position at the State University of New York at Binghamton, has filed a formal complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency, charging that she was denied tenure at Dartmouth because she is a woman and, further, that it was part of "a general pattern and practice" of sex discrimination, allegations that the College denies.

Whether or not a law suit will actually be filed is not yet clear. If the commission has not completed within six months its investigation aimed at determining whether there are sufficient grounds for a suit, it must grant the complainant "permission to sue." Smith's complaint was filed in June, and the investigation is apparently still in preliminary stages. When and if the matter comes to the courts, it will probably be a class-action suit, filed on behalf of all faculty women allegedly subjected to discriminatory treatment. An out-of-court settlement is possible, Smith's local attorney says, but he sees "no cause for optimism."

Joan Smith came to Dartmouth in 1971, within weeks of the official conferral of her Ph.D. from New York University. Toward the end of the normal six-year apprenticeship, she came up for tenure review, on which her superiors might judge whether she should be offered one of the Sociology Department's allotted positions on the permanent faculty. In the spring of 1977, the four tenured members of the department - all male, all full professors - were divided in their recommendations as to whether she should be offered tenure, and they indicated as much to the Committee Advisory to the President. This body, consisting of the academic dean and six senior faculty members, thereupon recommended to the President and the Trustees that Smith be promoted to associate professor without tenure, on a three-year contract, with another tenure review to be held at the end of the second year. An unusual practice at many institutions, such promotion is not uncommon at Dartmouth. Although Smith is the first woman to whom it has been applied, some 20 men have received the same treatment within the past few years.

Within the first year of the three-year contract, having received an offer for a tenured position at SUNY Binghamton, Smith requested an early tenure review, a procedure she claims is routine and College officials claim is unique. In other instances, assistant professors with competing job offers have asked for and received early tenure reviews in the fifth year of the normal six-year apprenticeship; Smith's case was, however, the first time an early review was requested and granted for an associate professor who had been promoted without tenure.

The senior members of the Sociology Department, by then three in number, made no clear recommendation after the second review, and the CAP turned down Smith's request for an early decision. Her supporters contend that, by delaying the tenure decision the first time and declining to make a decision a year later, the College has in effect denied her tenure twice. College officials, on the other hand, claim that, given no unequivocal recommenda- tion the first time and a situation relatively unchanged by the second, Smith has not technically been denied tenure at any time.

To sustain the allegation that Smith was a victim of discrimination, her supporters claim that her qualifications in all pertinent areas - teaching, scholarship, and service - were' superior to those of male colleagues since granted tenure. In support of charges of a pattern of sex discrimination at the College, they point out that there are only five women, or 3.2 per cent of the total, among tenured professors and that no woman who has come up for tenure review in the past three years has achieved it. The College maintains that the small number of tenured women is owing to the fact that most of the 55 female faculty members have been here less than six years, having been appointed to the junior ranks since coeducation started in 1972.

The College has also recently instituted a plan by which departments which show superior affirmative action efforts will receive special consideration in the assignment of new tenured positions and the presence of upper-level women faculty members will be increased by hiring associate and full professors from other schools. The new policy, according to College officials, bears no relation to Professor Smith's complaint.

Among other private institutions which have been embroiled in sex discrimination charges recently is Brown University, which last spring settled out of court a case which had been filed three years earlier and had already cost over $400,000. Aside from agreeing to grant tenure and back pay to three faculty women who had been denied tenure, the university made a large cash payment to another whose job had been eliminated and also set up a $400,000 "class-action pool" fund for payment of damages to others coming forth with claims found to be valid. Smith College is still awaiting the outcome of a similar case filed early in 1972, in which the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination found against the college, the college appealed, and the commission re-appealed to the state supreme court, which in turn ordered a new review.