As If Gender Mattered: Feminism and Change in Higher Education

Abstract

Survival not an academic skill.... It learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For master's will never dismantle master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Audre Lorde Sister Outsider, 1984 As Stanley Fish (1989) has observed: When members of an institution debate, it may seem that they are arguing about fundamental principles, but it often case that truly fundamental principle one that makes possible terms of disagreement and therefore not in dispute at all (p. 163). Uncovering common ground of our principled disagreements may be especially difficult in academia. We work, often than not, by establishing our identity against backdrop of points of we find disagreeable. Consider, for example, a recent book edited by Catherine Marshall (1997), Feminist Critical Policy Analysis: A Perspective from Post-Secondary Education. In introductory chapter she and her co-author, Estela Mara Bensimon, situate their work by telling us who they are not. premise of this book, as they put it, is that theories and methods of conventional policy analysis are and therefore incapable of understanding cases of Heilbrun's, Conley's, and Dalton's and other thousands of women professors, students and staff as resulting from structures, norms, practices, values and culture that are gendered (p. 2). The three women referenced in this sentence stand as icons for thousands of women who presumably share their experiences of sexism in higher education, and together this group will oppose a biased villain called conventional policy analysis. Feminist critical analysts, who will lead this opposition, view conventional policy studies methods as products of disciplinary traditions that are androcentric and therefore reject them as master's tools (italics in original, p. 6). The lines of dispute in this debate are firmly drawn between a conventional world where the maintenance of this patriarchal ideology made possible by coalitions of men in positions of power (p. 11), and a presumably unbiased, unconventional and desirable world defined by a woman-centered policy analysis. Bensimon and Marshall, in short, posit an academic wor ld that neatly and fundamentally divided between men and women. As I will show, there are a number of fundamental principles that feminist critic's share with villains they reject. By pointing to these similarities, however, I am not accusing feminists of wrongful deeds. My goal, instead, to situate work of academic feminism and, in particular, to arrive at a fuller understanding of principles that give rise to feminist criticism in higher education policy. Adopting Frank Fischer and John Forester (1993) have called argumentative turn in policy analysis, I am seeking to understand practical processes of argumentation in feminist policy analysis. In particular, I am interested in what policy analysts and planners do, how language and modes of representation both enable and constrain their work, how their practical rhetoric depicts and selects, describes and characterizes, includes and excludes, and more (p. 2). I feel compelled to point out that work of academic feminists, like that of their non-feminist counterparts, bound by conventio ns, norms, and rules that govern academia not because I'm hostile to feminist criticism, but because I have learned so much from it. Nonetheless, as unfolding of this essay 'will reveal, I am inclined to think that feminists cannot reject master's tools, and that it a good thing too. As I will conclude, if goal to change direction of higher education policy, than increasing one's sensitivity to nuances of master's only way :o go. I Feminist Critical Policy Analysis (1997) was written by academic women and published by a mainstream press. …