APPENDIX C Prepared for the Women's Studies Program by Evelyn Torton Beck, Director 1121 The Mill Building University of Maryland, College Park November 1, 1987 WOMEN'S STUDIES PROGRAM ENHANCEMENT PLAN Introduction The Women's Studies Program at The University of Maryland-College Park has reached a critical point in its development. At the very moment that feminist scholarship has taken a leading role and is widely perceived to be at the cutting edge of research across the disciplines, the Women's Studies Program has reached a point beyond which it cannot further its mission within the university because of budgetary constraints and the limitations of institutional support. At this moment in history, the rapid growth of feminist scholarship on an international scale converges with the recognition of the seriousness of "chilly climate" issues for women students and faculty. This convergence provides the critical moment for Women's Studies to be transformed from a tiny marginal unit into a unit the size of a small department on the scale of American Studies, Lingusitics, or Afro-American Studies. Such an expansion of the Women's Studies Program at this time is not only desirable, it is essential to the well-being of the body politic of the university. When new developments comparable to the rapid development of feminist scholarship and Women's Studies occur in fields closer to traditional areas of knowledge, the university has supported them with vast amounts of new resources--witness the recent creation of the Linguistics Program from zero funding to a faculty of seven in three years. Linguistics was not always a universally validated discipline and has only gained wide respect in the last ten years. Clearly, much is possible if the academic administration of the university chooses to make it happen. The time has come for the importance of the Women's Studies Program on this campus to be recognized. The Program must be given adequate support so it can continue to fulfill its mission to serve as an important center for feminist research and teaching. This can only be done by the addition of: 1) five new core Women's Studies faculty lines at junior and senior levels drawn from candidates with specialties in areas currently not covered by the core faculty or within the university, such as psychology, anthropology, women in international development, Black women's studies, women and language, the natural sciences, and a senior specialist in feminist epistemology 2) several joint appointments (made by transferring current affiliate faculty from existing departments--see brochure attached) 3) three graduate assistantships 4) an associate staff line 5) the development of plans for a Women's Studies major 6) a Ph.D. program in Women's Studies 7) a Women's Studies Research Center In short, Women's Studies must stop patching its program together and must become a real department in its own eyes and in the organizational structure of the university. To do this it will also need additional space and staff to administer its library and continue to publish Bridging, its monthly newsletter. Program History When the Women's Studies Program was founded at UMCP eleven years ago in 1976, it was one of the first programs to receive institutional support. The University of Maryland has thus been seen as a pioneer in the field of Women's Studies. The proximity of the Women's Studies Program to the National Women's Studies Association (housed on our campus) and Feminist Studies with its impeccable scholarly record (and edited by one of our core faculty members)further enhances our reputation and places us at the center of feminist scholarly activity. Since our founding, more than 500 colleges and universities have developed Women's Studies departments and programs on the premise that the traditional university curriculum was badly in need of essential correctives because it consistently and systematically omitted information about women from virtually all course content and did not take women's perspectives into account. In this respect, the education of University of Maryland students was, and continues to be, partial and distorted; as such, it does not adequately prepare either men or women to take their place in the modern world. The partiality of the training of Maryland graduate students in this respect was and is equally serious. Women's Studies is the one unit on campus whose academic mission mandates that it serve as a focalizer for research and teaching by and about women in fields of knowledge. The program thus not only provides an essential corrective, it also fulfills an essential function that the university cannot do without. In addition, as illustrated by the unprecedented success of our programming (the Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde poetry readings in 1986 and 1987 each drew 1,000 people to Tawes Theater; the Fall 1987 Women's Studies Polyseminar Lecture Series on "Feminism and Structures of Knowledge" consistently drew audiences of nearly two hundred for several weeks); Women's Studies has succeeded in creating a "community of scholars" which can serve as a model for bringing together diverse faculty, graduate and undergraduate students from across the disciplines and from the surrounding community. The Women's Studies Program which has generated this kind of activity, is currently staffed by a core faculty of three (the teaching equivalent however of not quite two full time faculty) since two of the three teach only partial loads because of other administrative assignments (as Director of the Program and as Editor of Feminist Studies respectively). In addition we have several part-timers, and approximately thirty affiliate faculty who offer Women's Studies courses intermittently in their home departments and are asked to serve on Women's Studies committees. In principle, this model is workable; in practice, however, it is not adequate. Affiliate Faculty The Women's Studies Program has attracted an outstanding Affiliate Faculty who teach Women's Studies core and affiliate courses, serve on Women's Studies Committees, and contribute to the intellectual life of the Program. The excellence of our Affiliate Faculty was demonstrated in a study prepared for our external review in 1986. This study charted the productivity of our Affiliate Faculty and showed that as measured by the numbers of books produced, essays published in refereed journals, the number of national and international presentations made, and prizes won, the Women's Studies Affiliate Faculty is far above the average on the College Park campus. Yet, the affiliate faculty (many of whom hold junior positions) are already seriously over-extended and remain at the mercy of their home departments for release time to teach their departmental Women's Studies courses. Moreover, Departments differentially validate feminist research and teaching. For some affiliates, participation in Women's Studies represents areal risk to their careers. For these reasons they cannot be relied upon to offer the courses that the Program needs for its certificate students on a regular basis. The university recently lost an outstanding senior woman because her home department was hostile to her affiliation with the Women's Studies Program and resented her teaching core Women's Studies courses, even on overload. The Women's Studies Program cannot continue to function in such a make-shift fashion and must be able to exercise more control of its offerings. Even a cursory reading of the Pease report and of the revised requirements of the College of Arts and Humanities should make the need for a strong Women's Studies Program self-evident. Even the few departments that have hired a specialist in women, as for example, the History Department, have not integrated the new scholarship on women into the vast majority of their other course offerings. In fact, the vast majority of courses on this campus remain unchanged with respect to content by or about women. It is time for this university to recognize that there are departments that will not respond to the new scholarship on women. It thus remains the task of Women's Studies to continue to serve as a corrective and to help students obtain the more complete education they need in order to function as informed citizens of the modern world. Without additional staff and graduate assistants, we cannot meet this challenge. While many other departments on this campus are also understaffed, the Women's Studies Program is in an anomalous position. The University can and does regulate the number of students who will be allowed to become specialists in any one field, let us say Economics for example, thereby improving the quality of the Economics major. But by regulating (and keeping at a very low level) the number of students who can take courses about women, we are limiting students' knowledge about women, thus depriving them of essential knowledge. Introductory Women's Studies courses are already far too big (minimum 40-50), but we have hesitated to cut class size any further for fear of depriving even more students, especially Certificate students and Independent Women's Studies majors, of access to required courses. Women's Studies Core Faculty The Women's Studies Program cannot have a real presence on campus without a larger core. Because of double allegiances, it is impossible to ask affiliate faculty to represent the Women's Studies Program on important university and college committees, such as the Collegiate Council, the Educational Policy and Planning Committee, the Chancellor's Commission on Women, or sub-committees of the Arts and Humanities Research Center that distribute research grants, fellowships and travel money. While it is unthinkable that Women's Studies should be without a voice on university decision making bodies, in fact, we do not have enough faculty to serve on these committees; we have never been able to send a representative from our Program to the University Senate, and will not be able to do so without additional faculty. With a core of only three who must serve on several internal Program committees and are regularly used as resources for all research on women by graduate and undergraduate students as well as faculty throughout the university, we are stretched beyond the limit. For example, this semester I am serving on six major committees and several sub-committees: I chair the Women's Studies Steering Committee as well as the Core Faculty Committee and serve on the Arts and Humanities Council, the Dean's Advisory Committee, the Arts and Humanities Center Advisory Board, the Undergraduate Women's Education Committee, and meet with the regular committees of the Women's Studies Program several times a year. I am the advisor to the Feminist Graduate Student Network, and also serve on at least six Ph.D. exams and dissertations committees in Political Science, Theater, Comparative Literature, German, and American Studies. Claire Moses serves on the Program Steering Committee, the Core Faculty Committee, the Program Curriculum Committee, the Chancellor's Commission on Women, the Collegiate Council, as well as several doctoral committees. Katie King, who is junior faculty and carrying a six course teaching load, serves on the Program Steering Committee, the Core Faculty Committee, and is advisor to the Undergraduate Feminist Student Collective. I have recently had to shift King from the Program Curriculum Committee so Women's Studies could have a representative on the College Educational Policy and Planning Committee. I am concerned that these demands on our faculty's time make it difficult, if not impossible to set aside the blocks of time needed for research and writing. My concern is greater, of course, for our junior faculty who should ideally be protected. If we expect to be able to keep and tenure our junior faculty whom we have worked hard to bring to Maryland, we will have to do better by them. If one of the Women's Studies Program core faculty receives a sabbatical or a fellowship (as may happen as soon as Fall 1988) our situation becomes critical. Without additional core faculty, we are in danger of losing our voice just as faculty governance on this campus is beginning to be more meaningful. The smallness of our size thus reduces the effect we can have on this campus, and thus perpetuates the chilly climate for women. Feminist Scholarship Feminist scholarship is at the cutting edge of research in all fields of knowledge. The excitement generated by the new scholarship on women has left no discipline untouched. On this campus, as elsewhere, the Women's Studies program has been the focalizer for organizing new knowledge and is responsible for the massive programming that is necessary to disseminate this new knowledge to all parts of the university. No university can any longer aspire to "greatness" if it does not have a strong and visible Women's Studies Program. Women's Studies research and feminist theorizing represent a major paradigm shift in thinking; in virtually all fields of knowledge, feminist scholars have opened new perspectives by questioning the very assumptions on which the disciplines have been built. Feminist thinking thus represents a major thought revolution, interdisciplinary in its inception. The creative energy and excitement generated by the new scholarship on women has led to a complex questioning that goes well beyond the focus on women that was the initial impulse behind feminist explorations. The focus has expanded to include considerations of race, class, ethnicity as well as-other cross-cultural factors. Catharine R. Stimpson, Dean of the Graduate School of Rutgers University, summarizes the tasks of the feminist project as "the deconstruction of error, the reconstruction of fact, and the construction of theory." In the eleven years of its existence at UMCP, The Women's Studies Program has accomplished much in proportion to its minuscule size. With a core faculty of two for its first seven years, and three since 1984, the program has developed a strong undergraduate certificate program, and has been granted permission to develop a graduate certificate in Women's Studies which it expects to have in place by the Fall term of 1988. This is a remarkable beginning, but it is not enough. We need to think in terms of a Ph.D. program in order to keep pace with the scholarship of present core faculty, with new developments in feminist research as well as to keep from falling behind other institutions. The Ph.D. in Women's Studies We are fortunate in that we already have numerous graduate students engaged in feminist research; an active Feminist Student Graduate Network which sponsored a Research Colloquium for Graduate Students and Faculty in 1987 is already in place. In the last two years the Women's Studies Program has offered three graduate seminars which attracted students from a dozen different departments from several Colleges within the university and a few students from the Consortium. It is well established in Higher Education that many of the best graduate students in the United States and from abroad are applying to those universities that offer Ph.D. work in Women's Studies; our Program staff responds to about ten letters or phone calls a month inquiring about the status of our Graduate Program. Many of these students make it clear that they would apply to the University of Maryland if we had a doctoral program in Women's Studies. New graduate programs in Women's Studies are developing swiftly across the country. Our own American Studies Department brings many students to campus because it offers a focus on women as an area of specialization; a more developed graduate program in Women's Studies would make that focus more of a concrete reality. The Women's Studies Research Center But in order to keep up with other major universities, the University of Maryland also needs to establish a Women's Studies Research Center, similar to those developed at thirty other institutions, that also offer graduate programs in Women's Studies, for example, the University of Wisconsin, Rutgers, Arizona, Brown, Stanford, UCLA, Ohio, Minnesota, to name only a few. Without such a center, the University of Maryland will forgo the possibility of receiving institutional Rockefeller or Mellon grants in gender studies, or an NEH summer seminar in feminist research, nor will it be able to attract excellent faculty on sabbatical from their home institutions who may wish to spend their leave in the area. Only the addition of five new faculty lines and several graduate assistants will make it possible for us to release anyone to direct a Women's Studies Research Center or even to write a grant proposal for seed money. At present there is no Women's Studies Research Center in the greater Washington/Maryland area. By building on the strengths of our core and affiliate faculty, many of whom are leaders in their fields, we could develop a center focusing on interdisciplinary work around a number of themes: 1) the intersection of issues of race, ethnicity, and gender 2) women's moral and cognitive development 3) women and public policy (Our proximity to Washington, D.C. presents a rare opportunity for researchers to affect "policymaking" on issues that pertain to women) 4) feminist pedagogy While these are areas in which we already have considerable strength ,the fact that none of our current core faculty are in the Social Sciences has further hampered our efforts to establish such a research center. Undoubtedly a Women's Studies research center would help us bring in grants and to sponsor conferences on the national and the local levels. Funding agencies are more likely to give grants to those universities that have themselves been willing to put resources into the new scholarship on women. In recent years the campus has identified as a serious problem the dwindling number of women faculty and administrators on this campus. A sizeable Women's Studies Program with a major, a Ph.D. program, and a Women's Studies Research Center would strengthen the departments and help not only to attract women faculty to this campus but also to retain those we already have. Conclusion The mission of the Women's Studies Program on this campus is a formidable one. It is up to Women's Studies to train the next generation of feminist scholars, to serve as a stimulus for transformation of the curriculum and general education, to foster the new scholarship on women across the campus, to redress the continuing partial perspectives of the other disciplines and to represent women's studies perspectives on campus committees. To carry out these major tasks we need a group of individuals on campus who are hired and evaluated as professors of Women's Studies. The University of Maryland must seize the day to make certain we do not lose what we have and to build strongly upon it to assure its continuance.