910.
Just so I can hear it.
Yeah.
Okay.
This is an interview with Bonnie Faneer.
It's April 23rd, 1997.
Bonnie, let's start.
Why don't you start with your telling me how you got involved in the women's studies program.
That's an interesting story.
I was hired in 1984.
And I had just a few years before made a dramatic transition from being a biology teacher
professor at Reef and College in Massachusetts to want to get some training and doing some research
about women in science and discovering women's studies.
That transition occurred nearly started in 1978 for me.
And I was at Wheaton directing their balance curriculum project, which is a curriculum transformation
with regards to gender from 1982 to 1984, time period.
And I looked around for jobs, but never mind the words.
We're looking for jobs in women's studies if possible.
And I had demonstrated a period.
Someone brought the position to my attention, the position at Albany as director of the women's studies program.
And I put in my application and was chosen to come as one of the candidates to be interviewed.
And of course, I subsequently got a job in September 1984.
What I found out subsequently was that there was a very strange connection that hadn't really been there,
but we hadn't really utilized it in terms of my coming to Albany.
And that is when I was at Wheaton College, I was on the search committee that brought Ruth Schmidt to Wheaton College as a provost.
And Ruth was the dean of one of the colleges at Albany and was very instrumental in supporting women's studies.
And was a good friend of the founders of the women's studies, people at Albany.
So I was on that search committee that brought the chosen.
And then Ruth was involved subsequently in getting me to come back to Wheaton to do the balance curriculum project after I had left my biology.
And then I went to the biology position, left the tender track biology position to pursue women in science stuff.
So when I then found, anyway, so that was this very strange connection that wasn't a real connection and wasn't even utilized in any particular way in terms of things.
I was really interested in getting the job because I very much wanted to become a women's studies person at that time and was willing to do administrative work because I had had experience as an administrator of that sounds rich and project.
I was willing to come on as a director of the program and to pretend that I was a women's studies person even though I was really still making the transition to becoming a women's studies person.
Did you see, how can I put this, what did you see your job at?
Well, one of the hysterical things about that was that indeed the search committee or the women's studies program, people had put together an actual job description that had so many things on the list that when I showed it to a colleague of mine at Wheaton in the biology department, he just laughed.
I mean, it really was hysterical but of course, women's studies people at Albany were really being honest about what they wanted to have done.
So that was very funny. I wanted to just tell the story that after I had the interview, the interview was incredibly professionally well done.
I felt supported but it was very carefully done so that both faculty and students who were involved asked really good questions.
It was just done in a very serious but not deadly kind of way.
At the end of this whole thing, then there was a perception kind of a wine and cheese sort of thing where people relax a little bit.
Came back to Wheaton. I remember telling my friends that I desperately wanted the job so badly.
The feeling among the people there, the feelings that I got was just fantastic. It was such a supportive but wonderfully constructively professional.
I can use that in the good sense of the term.
So I was on Tinder folks to find out about it.
I knew that certainly other people will fall for it but I was just thrilled to be together.
But back to my question.
What did you see?
Well, what do you think is your share of it?
Obviously, you have this job description with a million things on it.
But there are a lot of things that you thought were more important than others because so no problem.
The thing that you attended.
One major thing that I thought was, I don't know if it was expected me or if these were just the things that I charge of more,
but the research seminar for the majors of women's studies had been mostly an independent study thing.
I think that's because there hadn't been that many majors each year.
But the year that I came, there were 10 students who were majoring and were finishing up the seniors.
That was quite a number.
And so one of the things there that I did that became part of the problem was to really make the research seminar into a group experience.
It, in that sense, was changing it from an independent study to more of a culminated course as a group.
So there were just so many things.
A lot of it was PR on campus to be proved to present myself as a respectable, legitimate faculty member.
And I think my science expertise was a piece of what was attractive to the department and program at that time.
It's interesting because it's hard to remember exactly the minds that fit.
But I think a lot more outreach to students and clearly we were at a point where more students were electing majoring women's studies so to help that transitional long.
And a key development in the first couple of years, first year or two, was to change the community service requirement, a three credit and one course community service requirement into the women's studies internship program.
And so I worked with, and my Iris Berner had worked on that.
Susan Katlaw was very much a mover in that.
And she really shaped the internship program.
But what we managed to do was to get money, seed money to get the program going.
I think getting finding money, bits and pieces of money when we had practically no budget was a big piece of what I remember.
How did the program grow?
I mean, we began to pursue the only faculty.
And then, what about Linda Pershing?
Linda Nicholson was, when she came up for tenure, my understanding is that when she came up for tenure in her, wherever she was in,
the education of the nation's educational spot.
And then, when she came up for tenure, she was kind of changing and her option of chum-raying.
And so that my understanding is that the arrangement where half of her position was in education and the other half of her studies was in part because of the structural change that was going on.
So my position was the first position that was 100% in women's studies.
The previous directors of the program had been half in women's studies.
Well, whatever it was that they had been attached to another department.
I was not attached to a department.
There was a department.
I was asked after their right.
And so my position was different.
And for me, that was an advantage because, me and science, the science people would not have wanted me.
And I wouldn't have been able to do what I wanted to do.
So that was really the first time that I was solely 100% in women's studies had connected forever, apparently, to the directorship,
and that somebody noticed after many years.
That's not what I mean in the studio.
Yes.
So when I came in 1984, and in that, I think it was perhaps the first year when I was here, we'd have to check the years on the day time.
There was a SUNY-wide kind of a celebration of SUNY women conference that came out of nowhere and went to Buffalo and arrived in the snowstorms.
It just like gets pretty difficult with Buffalo.
And it was a celebration of SUNY first.
You know, the first world in president of this, and that was in the SUNY system.
And it also was a time when a people started the SUNY Women's Studies Council, which was very exciting for a while.
But at that occasion, I heard, really, and will, you give a talk on the historiography of Black women.
And she was at that time on a temporary, non-canutrac temperate position at Buffalo.
And in any case, I was impressed with her.
And at that time, we, at all, but we knew that there were targeted opportunities for this.
It had just been announced, and that meant that if you could find somebody who was really good at personal colors, then you could put that person in the pool.
But you had to find the before and even the before and recruiting, which is a very tricky issue to be in.
So I, I, that's where I connected with Lillian.
And we, in a bite of her to campus, I think, we're very excited about it.
It's such a, so that's Lillian's position was a target opportunity position.
And that's how, that was our first, you know, the growing of women's studies in terms of faculty lines.
Now, in her original position was having women's studies in terms of the corner.
And then, that's the point where she was understanding to the study, to even know she teaches courses that are plus or plus to the half of the corner.
And then the next growth, the next position growth was, again, see, this is the idea of looking for every opportunity that was possible for growing or getting money to do what we wanted to do.
The attention to multiculturalism and, quote, human diversity was the development that occurred, perhaps it was 1986.
It was something like that in 1987.
Again, we could do a double check on the year.
But because a new human diversity course requirement was in, to be in their general education program,
it was a search in, it was a search for a person who could teach human diversity courses.
And the person that that chose would win the purchase, and she was then given a choice of a department with which to be affiliated.
And so she chose who was stuck.
And again, there was a certain amount of administrative maneuvering over the years, if I may say that, because the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences merged with, you know, disappeared and the question became, well, where is her position?
And what's not needed for a junior person in a precarious position and therefore her position is 100% in the, but the next one.
And actually after that, Lou Stelalba's video was, the next person who was hired half and half with wax, like American Caribbean studies.
And that was also, she was also hired on a charge of opportunity conditions that was initiated by, at the, for the lens, and people in wax, who were very interested in,
and who brought these opportunities to us.
And then, by this time we were a department, actually.
Yes, okay, you want to know about the transitions.
Why don't we try and do this chronologically, really concentrating on people going back?
That's great.
And again, if we need to check, I can check the engines around 1990, but plus or minus.
So I as a director of women's studies, I attended a National Women's Studies Association special meetings that was called for program directors of women's studies program.
And I think it might have been the first meeting with the kind, the separate from the usual IWSA meeting.
And it was a wonderful meeting in Washington where the major issue was what's next for women's studies, and one of the big answers was to become departments, to become institutionalized the way that academic disciplines become institutionalized and higher education.
And so I came back from that meeting, asked few people how do we become a department?
How do you go from being a program to being a department?
And this was also a time when we knew, at just around that time, we knew that President O'Leary was going to be retiring, and there'd be an president.
And we thought that was an important time before the new president came in to become something that looked more structurally prominent.
So I asked around how do programs become departments in low and low, at all the name, at that time, the way you did it was to ask.
The president, you just write a letter and you ask the president, we just thought that was scary.
So of course, I wrote up this very, all the reasons and all the rationale.
And the fact is that I, from the beginning, from 1984 when I arrived, I had been included and treated as if I were a chair of the department, which meant that I was represented on the chair's council laws and whatever.
And so the argument was we function as a department, and now, and then of course, by the time whenever it was 1990 or so when the request was put in, we had, you know, not only with the Nicholson, the original and myself, but also with William's Linda Pershing.
And I can't remember if Luke's there at that time, I don't know, I'm not sure.
Plus we had formalized, I mean, over those previous bunch of years, in preparation for this week, formalized who would be joint faculty who would be voting faculty and who would be affiliated with a non-voting and stuff like that in addition to the court.
And he just said, yes, and it was simple, and he just laughed.
I wonder how much is the department, but how did you get a budget?
We had always had a budget.
You see, we had always had a budget.
And every year, every year, they would ask you to justify some major increment in whatever.
Of course, each year, I asked for more money for this and more money for that.
And each year, there would be pretty much across the board, maybe a 10% increase, so that you never got any thing.
If you wanted something special like we wanted some seed money for the internship program, you went to the vice president and said, please, we need special money for this.
Or we need special money to print up a brochure.
You wouldn't get it in your regular budget.
And then after that, your budget was being cut 10%, rather than an increase 10%, so that over the years, we've actually lost terms of budget.
We've lost, I don't know, the category.
But it's money for speakers or for actually controlling your own adjunct money.
And we just don't have that anymore.
And the adjunct lines come from some other decision-making process.
And so that's basically it.
So structurally, we really were functioning as a department.
One of the changes that has occurred over the years is that when I first became involved in the study, at the beginning, there was much more community involvement.
And perhaps you could speak to that.
Yes.
When I came in 1984, the structure, the government structure, was anybody who came to a women's studies meeting could vote on something.
And plus, there were, quote, community people who we had done outreach, who were invited to these meetings.
And there were a number of people who came for quite a while, one woman who was a high school teacher in the area, and feminist, and a couple of other people.
And the meetings were held in the evenings at somebody's house.
And students would come or wouldn't come in different years depending on their involvement.
You know, their own voluntary involvement, there were times when there was a lot of student involvement in times when there was a break-in.
And the community involvement, as we moved to having more core faculty and doing things more the way departments have to do things, particularly in terms of personnel decisions, renewals of contract.
And I had that before I came, actually.
And so, as we did more of that, there was, some of that was the personnel stuff.
Some of it was just the nitty-gritty of running a more and more active program.
So my sense is that I can remember being at one of these meetings in the evening where all the things we were talking about, the little nitty-gritty of running the program, were things that were really very boring for someone who was a community person.
The community attachments were, in particular, important when we started to do some fun-rate events.
But again, those activities were more frequent and less frequent over time.
And so, the kind of contribution that people were doing after the agencies to make the community really decreased significantly.
And an important, two important transitions. One was when the internship program developed.
That program matched students to a feminist mentor in the community, seeing something from kind of work in the community, business or a state structure, or what I'm saying, a agency.
And that became, we saw that as a formal link to the community and a back-and-forth contribution and whatever, each back-and-forth between the university and the community.
So that was something. Again, as things become more institutionalized in order to address particular needs of students, begin to see the gains of certain areas, the internship program and the mentoring stuff, it's just terrific.
But the loss is, which is that informal network and connection, loss, loss, and the other very important change, very important structural change,
was when we became a department, and the number of people who, number of faculty, who would then recognize formally as voting-y joint faculty, lobbies to shift our way of doing things from the community-based informal,
wherever comes through meaning can vote to having meetings, department meetings on campus, and we had to have bylaws and such.
And so having meetings on campus, doing the kind of business that departments do, and really, again, sort of relegating the community connections to more clearly defined structures and the internship program.
But the mentors have no other than making a very important contribution for our students, and we have this reception to honor them and all that.
They don't really have anything much to say, and they never, most of them, never thought of giving that kind of feedback to women's studies.
And interestingly, in terms of the question about what's next in the future, think about a way in which we could get more feedback and have more time.
And we can do that with community leaders and community, and things like that.
So that change to a department, one of the important structural change, we used to also have what we call advances in every tree, twice a year, in one in the intercession and one after school, over in the end of the spring semester,
where we would spend the whole afternoon and part of the evening together over poplar, dinner, and such.
And we'd also do it out in the country at somebody's house, and it was time for allowing us not only to get together and socialize with next, but to make a space for defining our vision of what we wanted to be doing.
And that also petered out to some extent, I think, because we caught up with many of our faculty, we were maturing instead of more moving on to do more publishing and their careers, you know, moving to the upper level of that sense.
And therefore, having a different range of responsibilities.
But also, I think the other piece was, I think, the piece of this change is that I think, and it's something to check in with lots of other people, that when, because I became a director in 1984, who stayed the director for, I don't know how many years.
Yeah, I don't know if that's a seven or eight or something, but it's a long time that I think there was a sense of relief from the part of some of the people who had felt that they had to be doing a lot of things for within study, because there wasn't a strong, kind of central, not so much authority, but a central person who was responsible and who just had to make certain things happen.
And so, I think, again, good for some things, in some sense, but also has the negative consequences in terms of how people feel responsible for that practice.
And I answered the question.
I was wondering why we got to know that.
Right. They saw all interesting, saw Chris.
Yeah, that's what we know.
There was a time, I guess, when the college of arts and science was combined, it was just between, and, and, and we had a few golden years.
Can you talk about that?
This before she burned her majesty behind her.
So, we had, again, the year I signed the last double check.
The new college of arts and sciences was formed, and the new dean, G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. was brought in, was chosen from the outside, and was brought in.
And in the transition time, over the summer, essentially, from the time that she arrived in the beginning of the summer, I connected with her, and she was very supportive of women's studies and had been involved with women's studies in so-apropelias institutions.
And she made it possible for us to move to a larger suite of rooms, and to get eventually, forever, a long time, but eventually, to actually get a full-time secretary.
And then also, I'll talk about the additional positions that throughout this step.
But we had been women's studies, had an office, where the secretary's office, which was reception area essentially, had just about enough room to turn four person to turn around in, and then, William and I, he had offices attached to that.
And so, of course, we were thrilled to get those offices at the time, but it was just time to leave with the tiny, and then Linda Pershing, when Linda Pershing was hired, her office was nearby, but not part of that.
In any case, the opportunity, when, like, at the street department moved out of those spaces, we moved into the suite of rooms right now, the social science is 341, which really, and gave us a little bit of more space to turn around in, and gave the chair of the department a nice office, and one year, you could really have the secretary, and have a few work studies through the space.
Work studies, and students who were just sitting on the hall, so we were, you know, I mean, we're really quite remarkable how we managed, but as though it took, it took, probably, at least a year for us to get full-time secretary, and we had various pieces of people's time in between.
But when we got Linda's role at full-time secretary, well, shared with students for research on women, but that makes sense in a lot of ways, when we felt very, very, very, very fortunate, not only to have a person who was there 100% of the time, but also because Linda's role is a veteran of university and has just been extraordinary, you know, just makes a huge difference.
And I think that's one of the things that really knows how many universities were out of here, and we have super confident that she is, and super supportive students. We all be wonderful.
Thanks, and that was quite remarkable, and terrific.
Can we talk about the position for that?
I don't think there was a time when we had a consultant comment, and yes, right?
Perhaps you could talk about how that came about, and how much the executive knew.
Okay, again, it would be really good. I would look up, but then we can trade down with the exact years involved in this.
But Margaret Anderson was asked to come in as a consultant to women's studies.
And I know that I was a junior person, and I was still very junior in the sense that part of what Margaret's recommendations were to us was to stop having us do try to do everything, and make sure I could get tenure, which I really appreciated.
But I should have ignored some of her advice, because one of the developments we had been doing in this, I contributed to, I think, an important way, was to develop graduate courses, and to make graduate opportunities in women's studies more visible.
And one of the things she suggested was you're doing too many things. You're trying to develop multicultural undergraduate women's studies, which is very important and great.
You're trying to develop graduate work in women's studies, which indeed we're trying to do.
And we were just doing a whole bunch of other things, and the meantime I was untenured, and might not get tenure, if I didn't finish my publishing projects and such, my scholarly projects and the tips.
But the reason why she was brought in at that particular moment, I had to trace that down.
I think that there was some opportunity, either through affirmative action grants or some kind of grant possibility that came up, that was to help promote and raise things in the department in general, and we saw that as an opportunity.
And so there may be some other reasons that I can't recall this time.
But it was a helpful, very helpful evaluation, and helpful also because, of course, we worked together to prepare all of that, which is a wonderful process.
And to force us to set some priorities, which we still were finding it hard to do, because really we've tried to do, and it was years since I've been married way from April 24, to try to do everything.
This is always the best thing to do it. But a key focus that was highlighted really by Margaret Anderson was to pay more attention to multicultural women's studies, and to look at our course in the million, millions that have been highlighted in her special area of scholarship in African-American.
But Margaret really said you really need to be taking a better look at your courses, both your core courses and the courses that people are teaching in the long areas, and really look at genderless and class, actuality better and a more integrated way.
So that was an important piece of academic development to try to work on that.
So how do we go about doing that?
We did a few workshop meetings of an faculty over period of time. Some of it, again, in connection with those advances that I mentioned there, there were a few occasions when we assigned short, important piece of funding.
I can't remember exactly, but I think one piece of the issue is racism and mental illness, and it's considered a seven-piece.
And had the people who had greater expertise in their areas, and directed discussion that happened a few times.
We had some reading groups that were put to place over time for focusing on African-American literature, and that was a very positive, as it was really fun, and a wonderful process.
We started, we did more focused discussions in the curriculum, looking at our curriculum.
I think those were basically the kind of things. And also then, when we began to shake the masters, we were much more clear about not just attending to that, but really putting integrated genderless class sexuality analysis, the kind of matrix analysis in the center of that.
Can you talk a little bit about shaking the masters' wish to fill in the work?
Right, right. We're here in 1997, and we're just finishing the final paperwork on getting that proof, and not a great time for a complete approval.
Well, the masters, I would say that the masters grew and grew out of the interest of being people, but in 1984, when I came, as I said, one of the things with my attention to the research seminar,
as more of having a certain range of content and not only being a support for individual students to do a research project, and within just a few years of age four, there were a few graduates, students around who had, around some other departments, who had connected with them in studies, and were working with them in studies, who were working with them.
Teaching Collective, Collie Clark was one, and I believe Collie might have been one of the first graduate students who wanted to, as I call you, Clark was in the Dr. Vars and Humanist Accentive Program, so the DAAHS was an important piece with this development.
And she took the research seminar under an independent study at the graduate level, and I realized, hey, I also did research seminar at a 500 level shared resource.
It may attract some graduate students, and that's what I did, and then there were a bunch of people in the social department who came into the course and were excited about it.
I think really is interesting, people from the English department in there, masters programming in there, Dr. Vars in English who came, so this wonderful group of graduate students over the years from many different departments in schools.
And once that started to happen, it was very exciting to get graduate students who really responded to the opportunity to do interdisciplinary, reunion interdisciplinary women studies, were responded to that opportunity with incredible joy, and in a quite a different approach from undergraduates, who choose the major and kind of take it from the students.
And take it for granted to a certain extent, and in that sense come to it in a different way. So it was very exciting in graduate students, which would be becoming involved.
And then when I started to look around, or other people also, look around at what the Master's degrees were beginning to pop up in women studies.
But we offered as many courses through other departments and all that, because we wanted two core courses through women studies.
We offered as many as most of the other places that were saying, hey, here you can go to a Master's in women studies. And our students were also graduating and going on to do Master's in women studies.
So we started working on that a long time ago. We developed a very first thing with developed a very exciting and structured PhD, well, it was a Master's, but then we realized this is silly.
We're really shaping a PhD in women's studies, which was very exciting and very wonderful. And then we thought, well, that's all very nice. And we didn't even have a Master's in women's studies.
So we finally got ourselves together. And the real problem there, and the reason it took so long, is that really so much of what people have done in women's studies for the development of the programming and the department, there were so few core people that was other people who knew really well.
And so in any case, the Master's finally, but it really took a very long time. And I could well have had a Master's in place quite a long time ago, being able to master it up and just do it.
We did it at one point just a couple of years back, and we really had this extraordinary vision of shaping a PhD quickly.
And that was a time when we thought we could get more lines and stuff.
Well, let's talk about more life. Let's talk about the latter day of women's studies.
Well, we looked around. This was then Patrick Swigher was president. And he was in a very, I think, generally for the university. He presented an expansionist perspective for the university.
He did the first hugely major fundraising and then developing an endowment in general for the university. And he was quite supportive of women's studies.
So as we looked around, we realized this is the time it was 1994, remember, because it was 10 years from when I had been hired.
And I would be only real line in the sense real other than targeted opportunity and human diversity line, which we didn't do as a cert.
So we hadn't done a search for, we had not had control of the search in women's studies for 10 years.
So we looked around at each other and realized that women's studies that our faculty was represented among most accomplished and respected faculty at the university in terms of all of the areas of teaching research and service.
So in case we made a very strong put together a very strong and very orchestrated and very consciously planned approach to presidents, Swigher, asking for a position in the study.
And it was just at that time that year that she was a dean and she was very supportive of this and very encouraging.
And that gave us a great deal of motivation, I think, to do it. But we set up a meeting with presidents, Swigher, in his meeting room, the seven normal meeting room, conference room.
Yeah, in the president's conference room. Some 10 or so or 12.
We took the senior women's studies faculty plus the core that was lily in and I believe went to Pershing, doing your people.
I was 10 years back then. Yeah, right, 1994. And we set up a meeting and of course had this long letter that laid out all of the wonderful things of our accomplishments and also the disability and something deserved in this little time to move women's studies at Albany from being among the top 10, probably, programs out of the 700 plus programs in the study of the country into the top five.
He thought that was a good pitch. And he said yes. And we all fell off our chair. And Judy Hudson was there and she is nodding. Yes.
It was one of the magical moments. It really was. Magical moment high point of higher education around the world. It was such a joy.
He had obviously decided. Yes. He called in his vice president, Karen Hitchcock, to be present at that meeting, which was very interesting.
We just quite know what that was about. But he did. And he said yes. And we were thrilled.
And we were asking for a senior position. That was the other piece of it is we wanted a senior position. And what we were able to do with that because of Judy Gillespie being deemed.
And at that time, Dean of Arts and Sciences, she was general. It wasn't just women's studies, but she did this in at least one of the departments.
She really was looking looking for several interesting conditions for some departments in the sense that if there was a really exciting candidates that showed up, she maneuvered in the English department, for example, to have several faculty hired when they only had one line.
And so she parlayed that English department. Well, similarly, in the study, she was able to parlay this one position into the possibility of two and at one point in the process of the three positions.
In part, the positions were multiplied in part because it efforts to increase faculty of color and protect the class faculty. That was a piece of the picture.
Perhaps, why she was able to do it at that particular moment. But in any case, we weren't able to hire Vivian Ains in the senior associate professor's position as chair of the department, as chair.
And we were able to hire Roger Pry. As a full professor, she was a full professor at class, and to hire her half an English and half a women's studies.
And the other thing that happened was when Bramford came to me.
Yes, that was not because linguistics was in the part. And she stepped down to the dean. That's right. She stepped down to the dean.
And her friends in the original department had also way back in Hispanic and Italian. And that department had so many serious problems that no one wanted to go back into that department.
And linguistics was not a department. It's a program. And it also involved in the origins of affirmative action and screening and study studies.
So, yes, a friend who became another full professor who is a core faculty member.
What about some of the things that you've learned?
You know what, before you go to students, I realized there's a piece that they get left out or might get left out and shouldn't get left out.
You're talking about real lines of the study, which is wonderful.
The picture was that in the period of time since 1984 that I can speak to another really important, I don't know if it's a new development, but it seemed to be, was that there were some people who were either graduate students who then finished their degrees and stayed around the area at Albany.
Or, and also people like Sushaffer's Act, who worked full time at the university in various capacities, you know, as a permanent employee, who became involved with women's studies and were able to, we're able to teach or run the teaching collected.
And they may, these are people that would be known. Some of them like Mary Galvin would be listed as an adjunct. Mary got her doctor of arts in English along the way.
So, first she kind of started and got involved as a graduate student and was able to get certain credits doing, working with the teaching collected.
But, then got her degree and so she'd be listed as a part-time adjunct. But Sushaffer's Act, who couldn't get paid for the work that she did because she had this full-time position, you know, contributed this huge amount to teaching courses that would not have been gotten taught because we didn't have the personnel to do it.
And one area in particular, that, or Maryans who contributed too very importantly were upward, with an upper level course, at 400 level, 500 level course, on lesbian and gay literature.
But, that wasn't the only area, Maryans who taught the, there's a 400-500 level course called literature of feminism, literature of feminism, whatever, under which they were able to teach a number of courses with different, different focus.
So, in any case, that was tremendously important. And then they got involved with the teaching collective and being each of them and then occasionally, I believe, paired up also, being the faculty person who really directs and advises the teaching collective now called the teaching collective internship and doing that over a number of years.
And since then, Mary Galvin has also developed a number of other courses that she's been able to teach. She taught a course on literature of AIDS, which is a very wonderful course, and a number of other things.
And then, actually, Mary Galvin also developed, and this is really a major contribution, not just for, not only for the work in itself, but specifically in the development of lesbian and gay and bisexual studies at the university, Mary developed the introduction to lesbian and gay studies course, and which we now offer, it's 101-Z or something like that.
But she developed that in T. Jokes, she worked with Nadia Lawson, who had also been a graduate student in English, and developed that course and co-taught that course.
And I think there might have been a grant to do that or something like that. But most tremendously important developments that, again, are not only not get documented, but they disappear because structurally these are not people who have the opportunity to have permanent positions, or who they deserve it.
And I'm sure there are other people, I guess there may be, you know, there's probably a few other people that we can talk about that way.
Okay, so that's a very important piece of culture.
Well, as you think of other people, we'll bring them in.
Right, let's record that.
Yes.
But let's talk about students.
Okay, students, all right.
The one student who was on the search committee when I was being interviewed was Stacey Young, and she then was a senior when I was hired.
And so she was in the research seminar that first year, I believe.
Great.
I can't remember now.
But anyway, so I believe so.
In any case, she, I also did a, she asked to do an independent study, especially she wanted to do special reading course on feminist theory, which was an area she was interested in.
So we did that for a semester, and that was very exciting for me.
And a lot of fun that seemed her, and it was really a wonderful thing.
And Stacey Young was such a talented and committed to, she was a student who was so talented and committed to activism and education as activism, but also other forms of activism that it was very exciting to work with her.
She subsequently gone on to Cornell and gotten PhD in, I believe, an international relations or international studies and was able in her TAships there to teach women studies courses and such.
And then she taught it.
She's been in Africa, and I expect, I mean, I know that she had a book that she had, that came out of her thesis that was going to be, I wasn't sure who to publish or was, but I should track that down.
But I would say that she was just, you know, here's this person, the first person, the first student I meet, and everyone who worked with Stacey, you know, really saw how wonderful it was, and she's just tremendously important to the computer.
But that first group of students, of course, in the research seminar for me, were very, very special. And Judy Disco was another person in that group, and she has worked for a number of nonprofit agencies and human services agencies in the area, and she's still in the area.
And what was really interesting was that, with this research seminar, when I came in, the students were scared stiff as it turns out.
And they were, you know, sort of, sort of a meadow of the women studies majors, seniors who kind of know everything and all that.
And when I got to talking with them, I realized that, you know, they were more scared than I was. And they were scared of the word research. They were scared of the word seminar.
So, and so in fact, out of that exchange, we ended up meeting it at different students' homes each week.
And that was just a very exciting semester, it was very, very special, because the students really wanted to be talking about the readings we were doing and working on their papers, and even though they were scared.
And so we could do this in their homes, and we would make food, people would make food and stuff. There was one student in that group who wanted to be a chef.
She wanted to, I mean, she was the women studies major, and she wanted to be a chef. And she was a great cook. And so we just had a wonderful timeline.
So it was very, very special. And here it is, and it's more than 10 years later, and I still teaching the research seminar, other people have taught it in between.
But I have been thinking about that possibility of could we do this, and could we do this in students' homes, and still make the course serious enough and focused in enough.
And I'm not sure.
Okay, so let's see, students will go in and many, many students will go in and say,
this is the kind of question that just erases everything.
That's right.
Well, I suppose, you know, I'm not saying something. The students, I mean, again, I could do names and stuff of certain people, but I think more,
I think that what I'm thinking of, or there's students who presented, A student presented herself as a very feminine and confident, self-confident student,
a young woman who dressed in type, but not terribly type clothes, and bright colors, and a lot of red and black and such.
And I remember her talking about some of the flags she got from some other people for, you know, looking this way, and you really offended all that kind of stuff.
And just that there's been, among the students, particularly among the majors, this great variety of diversity of students for whom feminine and that range of different things,
but most of whom, it has really meant a commitment to try to change the world in whichever way they're going to,
we have students who've made some of the studies, who knew they were going to be in business in some way,
or want to be a hotel management or whatever, and they were very comfortable with that.
And then there were other students who would, in a million years, want to take that kind of job, who saw themselves as, you know, radical particulars of culture and activists who go out and do all kinds of varying and anthropocene.
Daniel, Daniel and Cara Sirts is a student who was a women's studies major and double major with political science,
and was very, very good, very interesting, you know, very hard working and wonderful students in everything she did.
She also was a young communist, and she was the only member of the young, the young communist party, or something perhaps, the New York State, or something.
Not necessarily in the university, but she was involved in labor movement work and working with unions and such.
And she was part of the group of students who sat in in the administration building and who were arrested because they didn't leave at five minutes after five,
and they were supposed to leave at five, technically, or something like that. They were arrested by a rather snarky,
the direction of a rather snarky president O'Leary, and they were arrested and then a number of faculty supported them with their lawyer to fight this kind of thing at all that anyway,
and they eventually, the charges were dropped, well, Daniela received the first, it was a presidential, a real war, a war of, a gendiacal, or something, and she got the first one.
And it was such a wonderful moment because he presented it to her, and she was a very respectful in her demeanor with everyone.
So it was very, she had a wonderfully interesting approach to things, and I think coming out of the union training, my sense was that you don't have to, you can yell, you can do whatever things appropriately, you don't have to be in people's face,
you don't have to say nasty things to them, you really have to know what you can do, what you can't do, and figure out how you can remove it.
And she went on to law school, and she has been in the news quite a bit because she joined William Constler's law firm and has been involved with that kind of radical activist legal work,
and then when Constler died, the question was, well, who would take his play, right? And Daniela was one of the young lawyers who was presented as that,
and she's very talented. Another student I would mention is Mary Ann Merritt, who also went on to law school, and had done a number of things in relation to legal work.
And I believe she might also have been a double major diplomat for the blind and clinical clients, but she was someone who, she also, she shared the Bren Rose's award at school,
and when she was, I think, a senior, she, besides being again, you know, she's very excellent student and very smart and all was wonderful things, but she also responded to a poster on campus that was done by a Jewish heritage fraternity.
And the poster is quite demeaning, quite a demeaning presentation of a woman with a cross, and it was a real dumping on non-Jewish women and with very suggested language, and she got involved with a protest against that, and worked with, ended up working with Gloria and Sol and from advanced,
to work out with the bad fraternity and getting the support of the Greeks, the other fraternity, to, to say this is not appropriate and all this, she just was willing to really do the hard work of not just yelling about something, but figuring out how you get people to really learn something and perhaps change their position on some things, and that's, that was why she got good roses and awards, and come in a couple years back.
Do you think that the students have changed over the years?
I mean, you said they're very different, so I suppose it's hard to say, but, right, they're quite very, time has changed, time has changed, and yeah.
As a generalization, and these are generalizations for the record, so, and they have problems with these generalizations, but I think that some women's studies majors have hard time.
They basically get depressed with what they find, which is not unusual. I mean, I did too, at a certain point, and I was an older, and an older, a later stage, so if you have a tough issue about what you do with that, but, so some of the students, somehow, if they have a certain kind of optimism in them, they can bring that optimism to bear in the face of seeing a lot of horrible stuff.
But others don't seem to have that optimism, and so they will become quite cynical and discouraged, you know.
And, and tend to emphasize the negative side of things, which is very understandable, I guess.
I think that some women's studies majors are very, they resonate to the political concerns, but they don't, but if some of them are reluctant to engage with the intellectual, intellectual investigation, and such.
And so, they're just, I mean, they're not as good students as you as they could be, in certain sense, or as they may perhaps want to be in a way, because the, from my point of view, because the emotional stuff that's going on kind of interferes with them being able to, either interferes with or is an excuse for.
And so, I think you could say that is a, it's an easy cop out kind of thing to not push a little harder and develop the critical skills more.
And so, these are broad brush generalizations. One of the things is that Judith Baskin, Professor Injudek, studies and affiliated with the studies all these years, has said to be many times that in the course that she teaches on Jewish women literature and life or whatever that is, history and literature course,
that the women's studies majors, students, are bringing such a constructively critical analysis to the material in ways that students who don't major, who are not majoring in the studies, just don't do very much.
And so, that's always very encouraging. So, that analytical skill is something that many of our students do get, both majors and minors, because that really is at the core of,
of what a feminist perspective is supposed to be helping you do, with helping you challenge certain things, and helping you ask questions and look for structures that might be invisible that are porting easy to carry.
I don't think I got that. I don't know.
You were in the research, you were in the research seminar, that's the year that's been semester, that was quite a good one.
You have any reflections on that?
I was so impressed with everyone. I really liked it. It was interesting, and I think other people have commented on that, that the undergraduates were the women's studies majors, and they had all the jargon, and they had all the knowledge,
and the graduate students had the maturity and the analysis. And for me, sitting back and watching this, it was a very interesting contrast to the degree that, you know, that where the graduate students didn't have the data, you know, what they really could look in, in different ways, from the other younger, less-entour people.
This might be a good time to talk about where we were going, or my go, that university and in general.
Well, I would say that, when I think I wanted a part of my record here, that I've just been so hugely impressed with how we have been allowed to grow with all of our efforts, huge efforts on the part of so many people at the University,
and what we have achieved at this time, and at the same time, it's very frightening, and there's never a moment when I have not been aware that the discipline, the importance of the territory of women's studies and higher education, is at risk in many ways.
Of course, we know the structural ways and all of that, and more recently, it's just become more visible as you have trustees who openly trash, interdisciplinary studies, and all the charges against the politically areas that they have disciplinary areas like African Studies,
and women's studies that have arisen from particular political movements, that the charges that it's just politics, and of course disregarding the politics that are embedded in all of the disciplines, and some more skewed politics and others' discussions.
So there's that, I mean, there's a conservative perspective that would like to see us disappear and could make us disappear.
So that's always a really horrendous thought, and such.
But then there also are, it's more dismay in some ways, are the threats from within the community of people who call them feminists, threats that, you know, are in purposeful undermining of women's studies, as a discipline, as a structure of the University.
And that's not an unusual thing, it's not unique to the studies or to higher education, it's part of what happens in any, you know, in any arena where groups are struggling and individual struggling for their own place, I suppose, or whatever, but the kind of self-discupative.
And there's some people who can be nationally within the study, and also within a university, all of them.
It's self-destructive, you know, in the sense that the person who does it, usually I can't imagine what they're trying to accomplish, but also it's just incredibly destructive of the larger effort to have something resembling vaguely.
So it's resembling vaguely a safe space for people with a range of perspectives about feminism to be able to be part of education and have some control over their own space and such.
But it's also instructive to, you know, in that sense too, and often it, so I guess, I mean, what I'm coming down to with that is that women's studies has been a particular target for charges of racism, for example, also anti-democraticism and a whole range of things.
And in general, nationally, this is a thing that you trace the National Studies Association and the issues that are brought in such, but also within our department.
And in part, we are vulnerable, I mean, you could charge racism in a lot of places.
But we're more vulnerable in part because we care about that because we're striving to be anti-racist and to deal with their own racism and homophobia and ageism and, you know, a whole range of important issues.
So let's see, where am I trying to go with this? Sort of about the inter-suiture. Right.
I don't know how to quite, you know, clearly on that. But that's a key issue, and I mean, obviously a key issue, not just in terms of survival, of course, but in terms of, you know, each situation is a microcosm of the society at large.
And I think about better ways to model the kind of coalition building and working across the significant differences in perspectives and standards and such, that you have to do if the larger vision of a society in which people build each other and use the same kind of
different differences against each other.
And that is a key issue, but I still would advise other councils to address you with, in some ways, a dose of krijgen makes up the entire process in terms of the need of privacy.
that we just have to figure out better ways to do that.
And I'm not satisfied at all with how I do that in the classroom,
particularly in the research seminar.
But anyway, so for me anyway, that's a particular challenge,
but I think it's a challenge really for all of women's studies,
just as a challenge to Africana studies,
to examine and work on their homophobia,
talking about this general homophobia on the anti-women
and sexist and the whole range of things, and all of that.
So that's a big piece of picture.
But also then, I do put that in context in this period of time
in these 10, 12, 13 years that I've been in the study,
there's been a huge increase in national projects and national networks
to foster multicultural, non-sexist, and feminist education
and higher education.
And I've been really fortunate to be involved in some of those projects
in the Association of American College of University.
And it's remarkable to see how many people have been affected,
how many people are participating in doing this,
much, much, much greater network and, you know,
what's out there than you could imagine, I think.
And well beyond people only in women's studies programs
or Africana studies programs,
whatever, there's really an incredible magnification
of educating faculty and transforming faculty
and then, you know, working with students as a part of that
in multicultural education in this country.
And it's just extraordinarily so exciting and wonderful.
And it has been going on, it's spiteable because it's spite of break-in
and tuition and the conservatives.
And I hope that people will do doctoral thesis on, you know,
on the ways that institutional change is taking place in higher education
because it's like magnifying effect of one key person
or a number of key people using the nonprofit sector of higher education
and development in such, you know, as a terrific way of transforming the content
and the pedagogies of higher education.
So that is this wonderful thing that's going on and the reason I'm particularly
thought about it also is that so much of piece of that has to do with developing
tolerance and redefining what difference means and working against racism
and against sexism and against all that.
And that's, you know, it really is something that should get a whole lot more press
and isn't because, probably because it doesn't fit into the conservative agenda
that it's pretty predominant to this point.
Okay, so that's that one big piece.
Another big piece is the vision of what's next.
And the studies is indeed would be graduate work and what's going to happen with that
because that has been developing, but it still remasters the PhD programs
and what that really will be.
And then there's the kind of stuff we can't predict.
Okay, and I think about that a lot.
What, you know, given changes we don't have any control over
and given just change as a process and new perspectives and such and accidents
and things are in the city.
You know, how, how, I don't know, you know, how will within studies
have to change or transform itself or whatever to be, to fulfill the ultimate goal.
When I do feel I feel very attached to women's studies as a name, as a territory, as a history.
I mean, it should be much more multicultural.
There should be a much more respected and really much more space for acting.
American women's studies and Asian women's studies and all the criss-crosses
that are really should be a part of this.
But I know that I'm really went into that.
And I try to keep in mind, well, maybe there'll be a need in the future to not have that quite that identity.
But I also, right now, feel very strongly that if you get rid of that identity too much, you know,
then you lose the history that you develop on which it's based.
The good history and the history that we need to learn from, you know.
