Beyond Women's Studies: feminism in academic leaders.(IN HER OWN WORDS)

For 15 years my personal and professional identity had centered on feminism and Women's Studies, first as a graduate student and then as a Women's Studies faculty member and scholar and finally as a department chair of a Women's Studies Program at a state college. Then, in true Women's Studies fashion, I became a casualty of the academy's insistence on disciplinary-specificity and was out of a job.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I found a new job in a new school as Dr. Denise Bauer an academic associate dean of liberal arts, where my interdisciplinary background and success working across disciplinary boundaries and among multiple constituencies were seen as assets. And the pay was a lot better.

But this was a very different place: a professional college with masculinist vocational roots, a candidly corporate identity and no relationship to feminism. When I dressed in a suit for the first day at this new job, my daughter--who was nine at the time--looked me up and down and asked, "Mommy, are you still a feminist?"

Unfamiliar territory

Dressed in my new suit, imagine my surprise when I stepped into a lecture in which words like "mankind" and the universal "he" were common. And where all the women sat silently while the men dominated the discussion and set the tone. It was not a circle of conversational discussions incorporating feeling and thinking, but rather a series of chest-thumping monologues, a grand performance of one-upmanship, (that gender-specific language is intentional!) with the faculty member silently observing.

"Where do I begin?" I asked myself. "How do I even start to address all this?" My strong intellectual aversion to what I observed must be tempered by my responsibility to conduct fair, equitable evaluations that could significantly affect faculty members' jobs. At what point did my feminism impose itself and at what point did it illuminate problems that needed to be solved--and how would I learn to see the difference?