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Steiner says the investigations in Donna Napoli's case required more of his time than most of the cases MCAD lists. Napoli claims that the chairman of the Department of Romance Languages and Literature, Dante Della Terza, refused to hire her over a man who was "not at all as well qualified" as herself because she was a woman and not a native Italian. "Had I been exactly the same person, but a male Italian, I would have been hired. It was not a question of my qualifications," she says...
...Della Terza's judgment, however, Napoli's poor ability in Italian disqualified her. "I never discriminated against anyone in my life," he says. "I feel very strongly that I helped my former student as much as I could," he says, both in her candidacy in his department and, through calls to colleagues, in her search for jobs at other universities. Della Terza told the MCAD Napoli "makes such mistakes in speaking and writing Italian that we could not in good conscience allow her to teach courses more sophisticated than Elementary Italian and perhaps Intermediate Italian." Moreover, he said, Napoli...
Napoli says that when she wrote that letter, almost two years before she brought her complaint against Harvard, she was a "very scared graduate student. I hadn't published anything, I had no self-confidence; I only had Della Terza as a judge." Now an assistant professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, and with twelve published articles under her belt, Napoli remembers that "the idea of being humble and insignificant before a great professor is typical of female graduate students at Harvard. For a long time after I left Harvard, I asked myself, 'Do I have illusions about myself...
...Hill in the two years after she got her Ph.D. in 1973. At UNC, Napoli says, she taught Italian and linguistics to a class of native Italian graduate students, and "no one ever complained" about her language ability. The real reason Harvard did not hire her, Napoli thinks, is Della Terza's attitude toward women in graduate school. "Della Terza is not aware that he discriminated against me. He's convinced that a woman's place is in the home, raising children and having a nice life. He respects the intelligence of the women in the department, but he feels...
...Della Terza says he has devoted countless hours to demonstrating that his decision not to hire Napoli was based on merit alone, and he is pained by her suggestions to the contrary. "I see that you are involving me rather directly in your strongly polemical approach to the problem of your candidacy," he wrote to her in 1973. When she was his student, he went on to remind her, she "protested vehemently and dramatically" when he told her that only "long and patient training" could overcome her linguistic difficulties. He dismissed her claim that the department changed its offerings...