A stunning collection of brief essays and images from the Chronicle. Scroll through to find Martha S. Jones‘ beautiful contribution on the power of telling stories.
Please come to the Where We Stand event next Thursday, Oct 25, 5:30-7pm, in Mudd Atrium, to discuss the NAS report on sexual and gender harassment in the academy.
Good food, good company, kids welcome, and important conversations about how to fix stuff.
Think for a moment. How many full professors do you know at Homewood who are women? Now think back 15 years or so ago. How many of those faculty were arriving here, as assistant professors, and then went through rounds of promotions to arrive at full professor? That is to say, to what extent does the Homewood campus hire, mentor, promote, and retain women faculty? It’s a serious question about academic culture here, one we have only partial data on. This is one of the aspects of “organizational climate” that we will consider next week at Where We Stand (5:30-7pm on Thursday 10/25, Mudd Atrium).
The paths that women take through and around academic culture have been on my mind because of (of course) the NAS report on sexual and gender harassment, and it was in that spirit that I read University of Florida Professor Judith Pascoe’s recent article “Carolyn Heilbrun Told You So,” which considers the oeuvre of the late feminist, literary scholar, and mystery writer. (Professor Heilbrun earned her PhD in 1959 and in 1972 was the first woman to gain tenure in the Columbia University English department.)
I expected some rousing feminist prose from Heilbrun, but what I wasn’t fully prepared for were passages that we could just cut and paste into next week’s Where We Stand event. But there it is.
Here’s one excerpt from Pascoe’s piece:
If there’s a leitmotif running through Heilbrun’s writings, it’s a gloomy consideration of insiders versus outsiders, of those who swan about the academy like grandees versus those who tiptoe or stumble over tripwires. “At the simplest, most fundamental level, an outsider is identified by exclusion from the cultural patterns of bonding at the heart of society, at its centers of power,” Heilbrun wrote in Reinventing Womanhood [1979].11 Near the end of her career, she delivered a lecture in which she described the most salient sign of liminality as “its unsteadiness, its lack of clarity about exactly where one belongs and what one should be doing, or wants to be doing.”12
Pascoe reminds us of the role Heilbrun saw for “the oldest women in the room”:
At the end of Writing a Woman’s Life [1988], Heilbrun says, “I do not believe that death should be allowed to find us seated comfortably in our tenured positions. … Instead, we should make use of our security, our seniority, to take risks, to make noise, to be courageous, to become unpopular.”25
Pascoe closes, reflecting on #MeToo:
Only now is the feminist soaker hose that Heilbrun and her contemporaries hauled around the parched garden of academia beginning to flush out predatory male professors. Only now are a handful of those men being sent off to earlyish retirement. She hoped the writings of older feminists in the academy would help younger women “name their anger and find companionship in enduring it.”31Perhaps that is one hope in which she would not have been disappointed.
Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_Gold_Heilbrun
As you likely know, the NAS report on sexual and gender harassment makes plain at the outset that “the most potent predictor of sexual harassment is organizational climate” (x). We will be discussing NAS’s recommendations on how to improve that climate–across KSAS and WSE and across disciplines–at the annual Where We Stand event on Thursday, Oct 25 from 5:30-7pm in Mudd Atrium.
In the meantime, consider today’s Chronicle article “One Way to Be a Better Mentor to Grad Students? Try an Advising Statement” as one suggested step towards a healthier, more equitable academic culture.
Moin Syed, in the psychology department at University of Minnesota, shares his advising statement and invites colleagues to use and adapt it. Here’s an excerpt:
My job as an advisor is to help my advisees to be successful in their chosen career. I can’t do that if I don’t know what career is desired. I want my advisees to let me know the range of career paths in which they are interested at the earliest possible date. I also recognize that career paths change through graduate school. . . .
Although our training program is clearly designed to prepare you for an academic career, I am very well aware that not all of you will go that route. I will support you in whatever career path you choose, whether it is academic or not. I will do my best to help my advisees obtain the experiences and skills needed to succeed in those various careers.
P.S. Interested in participating in WFF@H? Want to guest blog, become a “friend of WFF@H,” or join? Take three minutes here.
Last week, Karen & I had the chance to sit down and talk with Kimberly Hewitt (Vice Provost for Institutional Equity) and Joy Gaslevic, (Associate Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Title IX Coordinator). We talked for over an hour in their Wyman Park office and we hope to collaborate on faculty events in the near future . . . . stay tuned.
What is the OIE? Here’s the overview, copied from their website:
The Office leads JHU efforts to foster an environment that is inclusive, respectful and free from discrimination and harassment. In its role, OIE ensures compliance with affirmative action and equal opportunity laws, investigates discrimination and sexual harassment complaints, and serves as a central resource for those with disabilities or those who require religious accommodation.
Just last week, the OIE published its 2017 annual report
. Vice Provost Hewitt introduces the report this way:
This document—the first annual report for our office—provides background and specific data on the university’s response to reports of sexual misconduct and other forms of discrimination and harassment. Our aim in this report, which covers the calendar year starting January 1, 2017, is to increase the transparency of our process and our community’s understanding of our work, and provide a baseline against which we can measure our progress in years ahead.
OIE has worked hard to establish solid processes and to improve investigation and report preparation techniques consistent with legal guidance and university values. At this point we believe we have made significant improvements in these areas and are modeling many best practices. We also hear the call from the community to identify ways to maintain the high quality of our work and complete the process more expeditiously. In response, OIE has engaged outside support to identify ways to streamline our approach to cases. We are also adding staff to the office in the coming year. We look forward to the ongoing process of improvement and understand the importance of our role as the principal means for members of the university community to seek recourse for their concerns about harassment and discrimination.
One of the things I like about teaching undergrads is helping students think about why they came to college anyhow, and what they want to get out of it while they’re here. Classicist and political theorist Danielle Allen (also director of the Safra Center of Ethics at Harvard, and author of Cuz, the story of her 
cousin Michael) gave a “radically woke and deeply conservative” commencement speech (video & transcript published in the Atlantic here) that I have shared with my students.
Today it also strikes me as pretty useful for faculty who are thinking about how to support FLI (first-generation and/or lower income) students, how to create a world in which black male faculty can go to the library without being offered directions off campus, and, you know, how to support equity for all sorts of humans who operate on a university campus.
In her speech Professor Allen quoted the Declaration of Independence, which she has been “following” for the past 20 years in her teaching (nontraditional as well as traditional students) and research. In fact, JHU alumna Emily Snell ’11 discovered, working with Allen, a new copy of the Declaration in England in 2015 (more about that here). Anyway, here’s your excerpt:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Professor Allen tells the Pomona graduating class:
It says we have these rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Among which! It’s examples, people!
It’s not a complete list! The job of thinking is not done.
It is your job. All right?
Clarify your values. Maybe you care about sustainability. Maybe you care about gender equality. Maybe you care about free markets and capitalism.
But connect them to the basic question of what is good for our community together. A shared story. And then, don’t forget: Activism is valuable, no question about it, but our job at the end of the day is to build institutions that secure our shared rights. That means understanding the user manual. All right? The institutions. And yes, we can alter them. They’re not given in perpetuity. Originalism is about understanding democratic empowerment, which is about recognizing that democratic citizens build and change their world.
All right?