MIT materials department tenure discrimination settlement

$850,000 settlement for a woman denied tenure under Tom's predecessor. Surfaces in Tom's first two months as department head and sets up the women-faculty problem he inherits.

I told you that a lot of the problems we face when you get out there are not technical problems, they're management problems, people problems. When I became department head in '95, this department had a terrible reputation about women. My predecessor happened to be a male chauvinist par excellence. In my first two months I was asked how much we were going to contribute to the eight-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar settlement for the woman who didn't get tenure under him. I said, well, you know what my budget is. He left me with a two-million-dollar deficit. Where do you want to take it from? That's what I told the assistant dean, and she kind of grudgingly hung up, and they didn't take anything from me then — just took it later.

When I was 39 in 1989, he was going on sabbatical, he took me to lunch over at the Faculty Club we used to have. He said, Tom, have you ever thought about becoming department head? He had been in for like seven years and he really wanted to pass the reins on to someone else, he was tired of it. I said, well, Mert, if I took the job of department head at 40, what would I do when I'm 50? So I sort of turned him down. He went off on sabbatical, and when he came back, he basically pulled his Machiavelli, got rid of another guy as head of the Materials Processing Center, put me in. Then in '95 — he screwed up a number of things. The department paid an $850,000 settlement to a woman who didn't get tenure, and he just screwed it up royally. That's why we had to pay the money. It wasn't that she was eligible for tenure, but he messed it up. He actually stepped down about six months earlier than I thought he was going to. He just said, I quit. The reason was because he was going to have to take Peggy Cebe up for tenure — we had no tenured women in the department at the time. She was not going to get it, everybody knew that. Now she's gone off to Tufts University and she's won teaching awards up there, but she wasn't going to get tenure. So he stepped down on January 15th, and a week later I had to present her case at engineering council. So I got to take the heat, and he got retired.

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