1995 Partial Notes from Women's Studies Director Meeting

*Please note that this document is incomplete, so the original first pages of the document are not present*

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• Maintain communication with 33 faculty members.
• Guide new course proposals and any course changes through approval, coordinating with all cross-listing departments.
• Revise brochure periodically.
• Revise announcement copy every three years.
• Raise funds for a library budget.
• Coordinate ordering of library books.
• Develop and control the budget.
• Prepare annual report.
• Represent Women's Studies on a number of committees where participation has been requested, e.g., Family Center Committee, Diversity Volunteers Committee, Carol Mack's Professional Women's Development program.
• Raise funds for Women's Studies speakers.
• Organize activities for Women's History Month.
• Recruit, train and supervise student worker, who will:
  • copy, distribute, collect and summarize class evaluations every term.
  • maintain the Women's Studies Bulletin Board.
  • assist with book orders.
  • design, copy and post fliers for speakers.

In addition, each Director has taken on a major project -- Pearson, the Women's Studies Speakers Series, Anderson - Levitt, the UMD Women's Agenda and coordination of the Michigan Women's Studies Association meeting (see above).

Lost Opportunities. Next year's Director--if we had one--ought to make an important contribution to the development of CASL's proposed Master's of Liberal Studies, as well as continuing to work with HFC on the 1996 Michigan Women's Studies Association meeting.

     Other planned business has been left undone for want of time:

• coordination with UM-AA to take advantage of the many speakers they bring in;
• further discussion and resolution of the proposal from some students and faculty that the - program focus on "Gender Studies" rather than "Women's Studies";
• development of the now optional thesis as an honors track;
• establishment of a Women's Studies award in honor of Dorothy Lee;
• proactive and coordinated development of the curriculum;
• most notably, pursuit of outside support from grants or from private donors.

Also left undone are the publishing and grant-writing that each Director foregoes when preoccupied with the tasks of running Women's Studies. For this reason, and because not all

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1. Fifteen faculty members teach courses cross-listed in Women's Studies. Another 13 (including one from Education, two from Management, and one from the Library) participate in Women's Studies meetings, teach related courses, and/or keep in touch because of their research activities.

Another 5 have asked to be kept on the e-mail distribution list. The Women's Studies faculty met three times this year, and the Director maintained regular contact through and e-mail distribution list.

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Departments recognize and reward the service to the College that directing Women's Studies represents, the past and the present Directors have been able to commit only one year to the job. Connie Flanagan had to quit in mid-year, 1992-93, when a research opportunity called her away. A committee covered Winter 1993, then Sheryl Pearson served for one intense year, 1993-94. Katie Anderson- Levitt has served for 1994-95 and must quit because of her new duties as a journal editor.

Thus we are left without a Director for the coming year. Faculty are interested but have declined for lack of time. Two candidates will be on sabbatical this year, and two declined because they knew the job would interfere with their extensive publishing commitments. Three other tenured faculty declined because they were already swamped with commitments as coordinators for their disciplines. Three untenured candidates declined or were dissuaded because taking the position without release time for it (and in some cases, without Department approval) was likely to hurt their progress toward tenure.

As noted in the 1993 Women's Studies report, "As long as the program operates on a strictly volunteer basis, we expect its fortunes to wax and wane intermittently, as they have in the last 12 years, as individual faculty members devote a heroic effort for a while and then burn out. Despite manifest enthusiasm from faculty and staff, the program cannoi flourish without administrative support.

Proposal: The Director of Women's Studies should be allowed a one-course reduction at least once a year, if not once a term, with the cost of the replacing adjunct faculty member covered by the College rather than the Department. This solution would (1) make it easier to recruit a new Director by providing a form of compensation for the job; (2) enhance the program’s stability by reducing Director burn-out, encouraging faculty to remain for several years in the position; (3) allow more time for the present and potential duties noted above.

2. Staffing the Introductory Course

Recruiting faculty to teach WS 275, Introduction to Women's Studies, is always difficult--not for lack of interest, but because the course is part of no faculty member's regular course load.

This situation results from the faculty's decision to introduce students to the interdisciplinary nature of Women's Studies in a course that is team taught across disciplines. The result of the teaming so far (Table 4) has been a cross-disciplinary dialogue that has been at least as stimulating for faculty as for students. The cross-disciplinary teaming has worked particularly well because we have "chained" the teams, encouraging each faculty member to offer the course twice consecutively, first as the newcomer and then as the "old hand." This system increases the interdisciplinary dialogue; for example, Luthra from Communications shared with anthropologist Anderson- Levitt the psychologically-oriented readings, concepts and exercises she had learned from Flanagan.

Unfortunately, because the course is part of no one's load, a few faculty members who would like to "take their turn" at teaching WS 275 face a conflict within their discipline. Most disciplines acknowledge that WS 275, like Honors courses, serves the entire College. However, a few disciplines either deny Women's Studies' relevance or feel that no faculty member can be spared for a course "outside" traditional boundaries. Worse, untenured faculty who wish to

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teach WS 275 run the risk, when their contribution to the College is not acknowledged, of being judged as slacking their duties to the discipline or department.

Our arrangement of chaining faculty creates a further complication in some disciplines, where it is especially difficult for a faculty member to commit to teaching WS 275 in two consecutive years. Thus the hiatus in 1993, when Dr. Luthra had to give higher priority to the Communications Program. Similarly, Dr. Clark had committed, with the French discipline’s approval, to teach WS 275 in Fall 1994. However, with Dr. Crapo leaving, Dr. Clark will keep her commitment for 1994 (which, her department chair notes, will not adversely affect her application for tenure and promotion), but she will not be able to teach WS 275 again in Fall 1995. The "chain" will have to be broken.

Proposals: (1) The College must make clear to each Department the value it places on
college-wide teaching in courses like WS 275. This kind of college-wide service to students
should be looked on with special favor by the CAL Executive Committee when considering
candidates for promotion and tenure, and a note to that effect should be included in promotion
files.

(2) As further recognition of the value of the course and of its role in the curriculum,
the CASL Curriculum Committee should permit Women's Studies 275 to count as a course
satisfying part of CASL's lower-division distribution requirements. (In the past, the
nonsensensical argument has been offered that since WS 275 crosses disciplinary boundaries, it can't be used to satisfy the present discipline-bound categories. Ironically, the point of the
distribution requirements is to provide students with a broad, interdisciplinary foundation.)

3. Visibility and Stability

Women's Studies needs an identifiable space on campus. Students coming to campus with an interest in gender issues don't know where to go, and CAL does not always know where to direct them because of turn over of Directors. Meanwhile, Directors accumulate considerable unsolicited mail, much of it useful information that get transferred from one office to another with each turn over.

Proposal: Create a modest Women's Studies Office where the Women's Studies student assistant and the Director could each keep fixed office hours and could store and display materials too bulky for the Women's Studies Bulletin Board. Space is scarce, of course, but this proposal should be incorporated into the plan for the new CAL building.

4. Disappearance of Funding for Campus-Wide Educational Efforts

Women's Studies has the obligation to educate the campus community on issues of gender equity, particularly during Women's History Month (March). However, the sources of potential funding for inviting speakers have disappeared. The Women's Commission lost its funding to the Diversity Committee, which gave the last grant for a Women's Studies Speakers Series but told Women's Studies not to come back for more funding. Now the Diversity fund is gone. We are good at stretching our dollars, but we cannot stretch $0.00.

Proposal: We must turn to the College to pick up the slack. We include a sum of $1500 in our 1995-96 budget proposal, hoping to squeeze from this amount at least two speakers for

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the Fall (to share between WS 275 and the campus community), and two speakers for Women's History Month in the Winter.