Settlement

After some three years, while the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigated the case, the College has reached a settlement with Professor Joan Smith, formerly of the Sociology Department, regarding her charges of sex discrimination against her in the matter of tenure. The settlement involved a payment to Smith, which the College attorney said was less than $50,000.

A brief statement from Provost Leonard Rieser '44 and Dean of the Faculty Hans Penner to senior members of the Sociology Department and the Women's Studies Program revealed that consideration had been given in settlement talks to Smith's renewing her involvement with the College "in some visiting or consultative capacity," but that such commitments had finally not been made. All differences with Smith were resolved, however, the statement concluded, and the provost and the dean encouraged "members of the faculty to extend to her the professional courtesies that would be accorded others holding academic appointments elsewhere."

When Smith came up for consideration of tenure first in 1977, at the end of the normal six-year probationary period, the senior members of the Sociology Department split two-to-two" on whether to recommend her for a position on the permanent faculty, and the Committee Advisory to the President voted to recommend to the president and the trustees that she be promoted to associate professor without tenure, with another review to be held two years later. When Smith was offered a tenured position at the State University of New York at Binghamton one year later, she requested an early review by her Dartmouth peers. The request was denied. Smith claimed that she had been denied tenure twice, when less qualified male faculty members had been granted permanent positions; the College's stand was that she had in fact at no time been denied tenure.

In 1978, Smith filed a formal complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charging that she was denied tenure because she is a woman and, further, that it was part of "a general pattern and practice" of sex discrimination at the College. After lengthy investigations, conducted both by the regional E.E.O.C. office in Boston and in New York, Smith was given permission to file suit, a legal procedure that had to be initiated within 90 days. The settlement was reached toward the end of that period.